The manufacturing industry is turning to machine vision to help produce increasingly complex products at higher levels of quality than ever before. The rapid proliferation of vision systems creates the need for robust and high-speed connectivity between the many vision systems in the modern factory and industrial factory floor and office networks. The latest generation of machine vision systems and industrial barcode readers addresses this challenge by incorporating Ethernet connectivity and tools to communicate directly with programmable logic controllers (PLCs), robot controllers, personal computers (PCs) and human machine interfaces (HMIs) in an integrated process control system. The new capabilities increase the value of vision systems and barcode readers by enabling the information they generate to be more easily accessed and utilized in other applications while reducing the time and cost required for implementation.