2 years ago
When you are selecting the right plastic card printer type for your business or organization, then you have arrived at the right place. Depending on what type of business you are involved in, and on your budget, a different plastic card printing type will be the most suitable one. A simple membership card printer will certainly be less demanding than the high security credit card equipment.
Overall, plastic card printers are coming down in price and are becoming the norm, replacing to a large degree what used to be standard, namely the card laminating machines. Just another example of plastic displacing paper it seems. Clearly, plastic has advantages. It is more sturdy, more durable and, as we will see, a plastic badge can encode a significantly more diverse type of information than paper.
The principal types of plastic badge printers you can choose from are: Single side card printers, Double side card printers, Rewritable plastic card machines, Magnetic stripe and smart card encoding card machines, and High-volume printers.
Single side and double side plastic badge printers
The simplest type of plastic badge printer is a single side printer. When you don't need too much information imprinted, a single side will usually be sufficient. Using just a single side makes the printer less expensive as it doesn't need to have a second print head in place or a mechanism to rotate and reprint the card. When more information is needed to be put on the card, such as in the case of health insurance cards, a double side plastic card printers are used.
Rewritable printers
To save money and storage of additional blank plastic cards, rewritable printers are used to advantage. Rewritable plastic printers use special type of plastic that is sensitive to heat in the sense that they will erase the printed text when exposed to a certain temperature. Typical rewritable card can be rewritten up to 500 times. Rewritable printers find use in colleges where a student can keep updating their information throughout the years, at ski resorts where a single card can be reused for another skier or in hotels to extend the person's stay, and elsewhere.
Magnetic and smart card encoding plastic badge printers
Plastic cards may incorporate magnetic strips, standard smart cards, and the newest touchless smart cards. Magnetic strips are the usual kind, found on the backs of credit and debit cards. Smart cards are the newest invention which allow both for storage of encoded information, as well as transmission up to a certain distance of the information in its newest incarnation as touchless smart cards. For instance, when you are using plastic badges as employee ID badges, a magnetic stripe would require magnetic stripe readers at entrances to buildings and rooms to ensure security. With touchless smart cards, swiping of the card is unnecessary anymore as the receiver by the door can sense and decode the information on the touchless smart card you are holding at a certain proximity to the receiver, and permit or deny access based on that information.
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