Zebra Technologies CARD PRINTER manual An Introduction To Plastic Card Printing, How It Works

An Introduction To

Plastic Card Printing

Plastic cards have become part of everyone’s life, from credit cards to driver’s licences, membership cards to ID badges. Their size, portability and durability have made them the vehicle of choice for many applications.

Plastic card printers offer the ability to quickly and easily produce a custom card tailored to an application or to personalise a preprinted card on demand, at the point of issue. They are simple to integrate with image capture systems (digital cameras, scanners etc.) and most databases.

Digitally printed plastic cards start with a blank plastic card that can be printed with any combination of graphics, text, photo- graphs and barcodes. Additional electronic information can also be encoded, such as magnetic stripes and Smart Card chips.

How It Works

All plastic card printers feature the same basic printing operations; dye sublimation and/or thermal transfer

printing. Both techniques involve a ribbon being heated as it passes under a thermal print head. Thermal

transfer heats and transfers ink onto the plastic card surface

whereas dye sublimation heats and undergoes a chemical change process that

turns the ink into a gaseous state which then “dyes” the plastic card.

The ribbon used in colour dye sublimation printing is divided into separate colour panels; Yellow, Magenta, and Cyan. These are most

commonly seen as part of a ribbon referred to as YMCKO which also includes a thermal

transfer black designed for printing barcodes

and a UV overlay to prevent the dye sublimation print from fading. The dye from the ribbon is applied to the plastic card as a multi-pass operation where the card passes under the printhead once for each of the ribbon panels. (Colour Ribbon)

yellow magenta cyan black overlay yellow magenta cyan black overlay

All printers are also capable of printing in mono- chrome using a single colour ribbon. These ribbons are less expensive than full colour multi-panel ribbons and are available in Black, White, Silver, Gold, Red, Green and Blue. (Monochrome Ribbon)

black

Card Durability and Security

Encoding Data Onto The Card

Information can also be stored on the card in a number of different formats:

Barcode - These are available in a wide variety of types (known as symbologies) and are ideal for storing a card or

other number for time & attendance, asset tagging and data capture applications.

Magnetic Stripe - This is the most commonly used data storage format on a plastic card and can be encoded in both Hi-

Co (more durable) and Lo-Co (less durable) formats. Selecting which type of magnetic stripe to adopt depends on how the card is to be used. The chart shows applications where magnetic stripes are used and which type is commonly used for that application.

Applications	Lo-Co	Hi-Co	Usage
Access Control			Daily
Membership Cards			Weekly/Monthly
Time and Attendance			Daily
Debit/Credit/Loyalty Cards			Weekly/Monthly

Smart Card - These can be used to store a much greater amount of information than a magnetic stripe. Most versions

can be encoded using a Zebra printer and one of the specialist encoder modules from DED. Smart Cards are commonly used for cashless payment, loyalty and bank/medical record storage.

Proximity Cards – These can store a similar amount of information to a smart card but the card does not need to come into physical contact with the reader. A small loop aerial located in the card surface allows information to be transmitted

between the card and reader from a small distance. Proximity cards are ideal for applications where a higher speed of transaction is required such as public transport passes.

The chart below shows the typical levels of durability and security achieved using the various printers and/or ribbon combinations.

Material	Printer	Card Life	Durabilty	Security
Overlay Vanish	P110, P120, P205, P210, P310, P330, P420	Up to 2 years	Normal	None
	Alto, Tempo, Avalon, Rio, Tango, Prima
	C30
Overlay Vanish with Built-In Bitmap	P110, P120, P205, P210, P310, P330, P420	Up to 2 years	Normal	Visual - Low
	Alto, Tempo, Avalon, Rio, Tango, Prima
	C30
Overlay Vanish with Hologram	P310, P330, P420	Up to 2 years	Normal	Visual - High
	Prima
Clear Overlaminate Patch	P520, P640	Up to 5 years (P520)	High	None
	Prima & Laminator, Sicura	5 years Magicard
		Up to 7 years (P640)
Overlaminate Patch with Hologram	P520, P640	Up to 5 years (P520)	High	Visual - High
	Prima & Laminator, Sicura	5 years Magicard
		Up to 7 years (P640)

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