A hand-supportable planar laser illumination and imaging (PLIIM) based camera system for producing digital linear images of a object within a working range, wherein the digital linear images contain pixels having a substantially uniform aspect-ratio independent of the measured relative velocity of the object while the PLIIM based camera system is manually moved (e.g. swept) past the object during illumination and imaging operations. The hand-supportable PLIIM based camera system comprises an object velocity measurement subsystem mounted within its hand-supportable housing, for determining the velocity of the object relative to the hand-supportable housing and generating object velocity data indicative of the determined velocity of the object. Also, a camera control computer is mounted within the hand-supportable housing, for controlling the operation of the PLIIM-based linear imaging subsystem, in automatic response to object velocity data generated by the object velocity measurement subsystem. During object illumination and imaging operations, the camera control computer (1) uses the object velocity data to determine a photo-integration time period parameter for the linear image detection array which produces digital linear images of the object, containing pixels having a substantially uniform aspect-ratio, independent of relative velocity of the object; and then (2) uses the determined photo-integration time period parameter to automatically control the operation of the linear image detection array so that the linear image detection array automatically produces digital linear images of the object, containing pixels having a substantially uniform aspect-ratio independent of the measured velocity of the moving object. By virtue of the present invention, it is now possible to produce digital images of objects containing pixels having a substantially uniform aspect-ratio, thereby satisfying the processing constraints associated with conventional 2-D bar code reading and OCR algorithms used in automatic object identification applications.