What's the difference between an MRZ reader and a passport reader device?

An MRZ reader is a piece of software, an OCR engine essentially, specifically built to recognize and extract data from a Machine Readable Zone. A passport reader device is a physical piece of hardware, often used at airports, government offices, or hotel front desks, that typically includes an MRZ reader as one of its capabilities but also bundles in other functions a software-only solution wouldn't have on its own.

Dedicated passport reader hardware usually includes a purpose-built camera or optical scanner with controlled lighting, sometimes across multiple light sources (visible, UV, infrared) to check physical security features that a plain photo can't reveal. Many also include an RFID reader to communicate with the embedded chip in an e-passport, allowing them to perform chip authentication in addition to MRZ and visual zone reading.

This combination makes dedicated hardware particularly well suited for high-security settings like border control, where physical document authenticity checks matter as much as data extraction.

Software-based MRZ and document readers, by contrast, typically run on standard hardware, a smartphone, a webcam, a regular office scanner, and focus primarily on extracting and validating data rather than performing deep physical security analysis. They're generally cheaper to deploy at scale, since there's no specialized hardware to purchase or maintain, and are what make remote, app-based identity verification practical, since you can't ship dedicated passport reader hardware to every customer's home.

Many businesses actually use both, depending on the setting: dedicated hardware at a staffed location like a bank branch or hotel desk, where a slightly higher upfront cost is easily justified, and software-based scanning through a mobile app or website for remote or self-service scenarios, where deploying hardware to every user isn't feasible.

ScanDoc's core product is the software side of this equation, SDK and API-based document scanning that runs on regular smartphones and standard scanning equipment, which is the more relevant model for most digital onboarding, remote check-in, and app-based verification use cases, rather than a fixed-location, hardware-dependent alternative.