Laser etching:   Material is etched with the laser.   You can feel the etching with your fingernail.   The lines are etched into the surface of the material.      On anodized and colored aluminum, the metal will change color from the base color to white thus providing a high contrast mark.  
Laser marking:   Material is marked with the laser.   The characters are marked onto the surface of the material.   With this method the desired result is a bold contrasting character.    On stainless steel, the characters are black.    On plastic, the characters are dark gray (near black in most cases). 

Laser etched/marked bar coded tags are designed to perform in a wide variety of conditions.  Laser etched/marked bar codes perform differently than printed bar codes because they are physically etched and/or impregnated into the surface of the material.  This gives you the benefit of a very durable surface, especially on polyurethane which withstands a great deal of chemical and heat abuse.  It is always best to determine if your scanner will acceptably read the tags before and after submitting them to your specific environmental conditions.  Depending on the bar code scanner, you may get better results scanning at an upward angle, not straight on.  For your convenience, we work directly with a Symbol Technologies VAR and pass on our bar code equipment discounts to our customers and distributors.   Please keep us in mind if you are in need of any equipment or would like to demo a scanner.   Pricing is determined by the cycle time required to produce the image on the tag.  Therefore, the larger the image, the higher the cost.  We can burn logos, a wide variety of fonts and bar codes, and do custom identification right off of your data disk. Because each job is unique, we do quote each one individually.   If a bar coded tag is going to be scanned by a hand held scanner 6-10" away, you may consider decreasing the size of the tag to save some money.   Factory direct pricing for these tags can range from $.35 to $3.50 per tag depending on the size, quantity, setup costs, fixturing designs and programming costs.    We can sequentially number or burn custom numbers from a text file.  If you would like specific prototypes made, would like additional samples, have any questions or concerns, please contact us.