PSC Inc. — Company Profile
Company overview. PSC Inc. was a U.S. manufacturer of automated data-collection hardware. It was founded in 1969 in Webster, New York (a Rochester suburb) as Photographic Sciences Corporation by John E. Blackert (formerly Xerox) and Lawrence P. Albertson (formerly Eastman Kodak). It later traded publicly on Nasdaq under the ticker PSCX and was headquartered in Webster, N.Y., later Portland, Ore. At its peak around 2000–2001 it reported roughly 1,000 employees worldwide and revenue of about $241 million in 2000; it filed for bankruptcy reorganization in 2002, with Littlejohn & Co. buying its senior and subordinated debt (~$124 million). Datalogic S.p.A. acquired the company in 2005 for approximately $195 million and retired the PSC brand in April 2007, retaining product names such as Magellan, Duet, Falcon, PowerScan and QuickScan.
Products / services / operations. PSC was an operating company, not a shell licensor. It made bar code scanners and readers (handheld and fixed-position), portable and mobile data terminals, wireless terminals, linear bar code verifiers, RFID readers, scan engines, and self-checkout/retail point-of-sale scanning systems. It sold to grocery and retail chains, parcel and postal carriers, and industrial customers, and supplied OEM scan engines. It expanded via the 1996 acquisition of Spectra-Physics Scanning Systems (Eugene, Ore.) and Percon Inc., and spun off software unit IntelliTrack during its 2002 reorganization.
Patent-litigation posture. PSC appears as a genuine two-way litigant: one tracked plaintiff case and one defendant case, both filed 1996-04-01 in the U.S. District Court for the W.D.N.Y. — consistent with an operating company both enforcing and defending patents rather than an NPE. Its disputes were patent and license-royalty fights against larger competitor Symbol Technologies, not assertion campaigns against end users.
Notable cases / context. The tracked pair — PSC Inc. v. Symbol Technologies, Inc. et al. and Symbol Technologies, Inc. v. PSC Inc. — concerned PSC's Direct Illumination (DI-1000) scan engine and a 1991 Symbol license; PSC also pursued antitrust/unfair-competition counterclaims and a related arbitration over a Spectra-Physics license. Separately, PSC was among the bar-code manufacturers (with Symbol, Intermec, Metrologic, Zebra, Cognex and others) that jointly challenged the Lemelson machine-vision/automatic-identification patents, which were held invalid and unenforceable in 2000–2002.