Quick Response or QR codes are used in a number of settings to track products along a supply chain or to provide users with quick access to a website.
The QR Codes come in a large range of sizes and formats which determine what kind of data they will store, called the input mode. There are 4 types of commonly used input modes for QR codes which are used for storing data and information.
Numeric mode
This type of QR code can store up to 7,089 decimal or numeric character ranging from 0 to 9.
Alphanumeric Mode
Up to 4,296 alphanumeric characters can be stored and well as spaces, this type of QR code can store numeric characters ranging from 0 to 9 as well as uppercase letters from A to Z and several symbols.
Byte Mode
This is used for characters from the ISO–8859–1 character set which allows for up to 2,953 characters to be stored.
Kanji mode
This is the original mode or QR code type which was first developed but is not widely used as it can only store up to 1,817 characters from the Shift JIS character set and is used to encode characters in Japanese.
There are also another two QR code types which are derived from other QR codes but include their own modifications.
Structured Append mode
This stores data from multiple QR codes and allows for up to 16 QR codes to be read at the same time.
FNC1 mode
This type of QR code allows for it to function as a GS1 barcode.