Why QR codes have a white background...

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The QR code on our products is small, so the Zazzle techs are trying to eliminate any possibility of it being unreadable by making it the way it is now (I'm not referring to whether the position is the best or not). Beside depending on the way a QR code is printed on a product, outside elements also make for codes not being read correctly... such as light in a room, the angle with which a QR code is being read by a device, dirty scanner eye, etc etc.

The amount of white space, without a background color shining through a png file, or a 'frame' around it, is to make sure the 'scanner eye', whether from a phone or other scan device will not be distracted by 'noise' that will make a code unreadable. A smudge can already create a scan problem. You want a QR code to be read as exact as possible, otherwise an error messages will pop up and the QR just plainly doesn't work. In our case... we want customers who scan a QR code on one of our products to be taken to our store, and not get an error message.

I researched QR codes recently and came across this:

"Do QR codes need a white background?

The answer is ‘Yes and No’, as driven by two primary factors:

• The tolerance of the specific software being used to scan the QR code,
• The specification of QR codes allows for some tone/shade/brightness tolerance, which can be affected by the environment at the time of scanning.

The big one is the scanner software. There are many different scanning apps out there, though this is now consolidating to much less numbers as cellphone operating systems are starting to supply QR code scanning as a baseline function of their baseline operating system features. Some of the scanning apps out there will even process a tonally inverted QR code (white dots on black), even though the proper specification of QR codes is that the background be white. So, the technical specification of QR codes is that the background should be white, but it is not always the case that the scanning software has that limitation.

Also, the specification of QR codes is that the background be white, but the specification is also designed to be tolerant of QR code damage. So you on the one hand you can have a very faded QR code that scans under certain lighting just fine, or you can have a red background (which is commonly converted to grayscale as very dark for image processing) which visually looks quite clear to people but is un-scannable.

There’s certainly a good practice to keep the background lighter than the code pixels, but I suspect over time the scanning software out there will become more and more tolerant of custom colors, and even inverted codes.

But as of now, keeping the background as white as possible, you lower the chances of scanning difficulties."