Plastic Card Personalisation

Magnetic Stripe Encoding

the barcode business’s card personalisation systems are able to encode a magnetic stripe. The industry will refer to hico and loco technologies. To simplify these references, a loco magnetic stripe tends to be used in low security applications, e.g. Loyalty, Membership and Retail, etc. The coercivity of this tape tends to be 300; in essence, coercivity relates to the strength of the magnetic field required to write information to the tape, therefore, the lower the coercivity the easier it is to either corrupt or re-write the information to the tape.

Any hico tape can range from 600 coercivity to 4,000, although the most common is 2,750. This tape has now been fully adopted by the banking market and is also used in the majority of access control applications. It should be noted that the higher the coercivity, the more expensive the magnetic tape.

Regardless of the magnetic tape specification, the encoding capacities remain the same. Each ISO card will contain three tracks of information and the specification and capabilities of these is summarised as below.

Smart Card Encoding

the barcode business use systems that are capable of encoding a smart card. The capacities offered by these systems are subject to :

1. The card personalisation option.
2. The amount of data to be encoded to the module.

We either inkjet print up to 2 lines of personalisation, thermally print or emboss a smart card. As an average, the Mühlbauer inkjet and chip initialisation systems will yield approximately 3,500 per hour, therefore offering a capacity in excess of 1 million cards per month. Should the thermal printing option be preferred, reduced capacities are available providing a yield of approximately 60,000 cards per month.

Embossing

Embossing is the raised characters found on all credit cards. Whilst it is possible to emboss a card outside of ISO specifications (please see below template), it is recommended that clients conform to those positions summarised below.

You will note that the embossing positions are situated at the bottom of the card. There are two reasons for this, firstly, most plastic cards have a signature panel of some kind which tends to be positioned to the centre of the card on the reverse. If a card was to be embossed within this area, obviously the functionality of the signature panel would be compromised due to the “denting”. Also, it is unlikely for the card to be embossed in the top half due to the likelihood of a magnetic stripe being positioned to the card reverse.

Secondly, should embossed characters be positioned within this area, it would prevent the magnetic stripe from being encoded, or subsequently read. If a card has neither a magnetic stripe nor a signature panel, it is possible with some machines to emboss up to 11 lines to the face of the card. However, the ISO standard is for up to 4 lines of simplex characters and 1 line of OCR characters to be printed. Embossing restricts the customer to only 2 font types.

A maximum of 27 simplex characters can be personalised in 1 line, and a maximum of 19 OCR characters can be printed in one line. It is not possible to print text using the OCR fonts, although the simplex characters can print either numerals or text.

All embossed characters can be tipped in different coloured foils. The most common are gold, silver, black and white, although rare, it is possible to tip the embossed characters in alternative colours.

It is not possible to emboss both sides of the card.

Inkjet Printing

Inkjet printing is a high-speed economical method of card personalisation. All characters are printed in black to the flush surface of a card.

It is possible to inkjet any TT (true type) font in any size font onto the card using the latest video jet and Domino technology. The disadvantage with inkjet printing is that the characters can appear slightly ragged in comparison to those offered by thermal printing. Inkjet systems can yield up to 20,000 cards per hour, therefore, providing a monthly capacity in excess of 8 million. Regardless of the amount of information that is required to be personalised on the card, the machine throughput is constant.

Thermal Printing

Thermal printing offers a high level of quality for flat surface printing. Unlike inkjet printing, the characters are clearly printed and can (using different ribbons) print high quality photographic images. Thermal characters can be printed in colours other than black, including gold, silver, white, blue and red. The disadvantage with thermal printing is that it is slower and more expensive.

It should be noted that card throughput is reduced when additional lines of information are printed.