SYSTEM INCLUDES:

 Cada Sistema Incluye :
  • ELT-P310C/MSE CARD PRINTER.
    Impresora de Tarjetas
  • DIGITAL CAMERA, TRIPOD, PRO SOFTWARE, VIDEO CAPTURE.
    Cámara Digital, Trípode, Programa Profesional, Cap turación de imagen.
  • 100- 30MIL HI-CO PREM CARDS.
    100-30grueso hi-co Tarjetas.
  • RIBBONS FOR 350 IMAGES.
    Cinta /ribbon para 350 imágenes.
  • CLEANING KIT.
    Kit de Limpieza y Mantenimiento.      

Call For Pricing !! Llamar para Precios !

Printer - P310 big

Digital Card Printing Advantages

 
Image Quality
The image quality of plastic cards produced with digital printing technology is far superior to those produced through the traditional manual method described above. The cards look better because digitized photo images are sharper and can be edited for color quality. Placement of various graphical elements of the card is more consistent and text is clearer and more readable.

Flexibility
Plastic card printers can print text, line art, and photographic images. They can also encode magnetic stripes and provide smart card chip programming contact stations. All in a single step process. Card design software used to produce the cards provides users the flexibility to change designs, store and access multiple designs, create variable text fields, and implement data base programs to store images and track information.

Security
Plastic card printers can also apply various types of card protection materials to make cards resistant to tampering and alteration. These protection materials including hologram overlays, make cards more secure because they cannot be easily reproduced or counterfeited.

Durability
Card protection materials such as overlay varnishes, overlaminate patches, and secure card media each provide various levels of card durability by making the cards resistant to abrasion, UV light exposure, water damage, and exposure to liquid chemicals.

Economy
In-house printing of plastic cards using a card printer eliminates both the need for, and costs associated with, producing cards using the time consuming, old-fashioned photographic cut/paste/laminate method. A plastic card printer is also more economical than jobbing out your card requirements to a lithographic printer or service bureau. Outside suppliers must mark up card production costs significantly in order to cover overhead and servicing costs, making them an economical alternative only for large volume applications.

Convenience
Printing your own plastic cards give you the convenience of being able to produce cards when you need them, where you need them, letting you issue new cards on demand. Having your own card printer capability also makes it easy to make changes to card content or design quickly.


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. The difference is that thermal transfer ribbons heat up and transfer ink onto the plastic card, and dye sublimation ribbons heat up and undergo a chemical change process that turns the ink into a gaseous state which then permeates the plastic card.

The ribbon used in color dye sublimation printing is divided into three separate color panels Yellow, Magenta, and Cyan (see Figure 1). This configuration is referred to as YMC.

yellow magenta cyan yellow magenta cyan

(fig.1)

These three colors are the primary colors used in printing to
produce all other colors including black.

The dye from the ribbon is applied to the plastic card via a multi-pass operation. This means the card will pass under the print head once for each of the three colored ribbon panels - applying each color separately.
 

yellow

 yellow & magenta yellow, magenta & cyan
 

The term Dye Sublimation is also referred to as Dye Diffusion. When the Dye on the ribbon is heated by the print head it is transformed from a solid to a gas and diffused onto the plastic card (the card is specially coated to absorb the color dye). The hotter the elements in the print head, the more dye is converted to a gas and absorbed into the plastic card. At 300dpi the picture quality and continuous color tones produced by a dye sublimation printer outperform most laser or ink jet printers with higher resolutions

The advantage of dye sublimation is the millions of colors that can be created. The colors result from a combination of the panels on the ribbon. By combining these colors and varying the intensity of the heat, providing various shades of each color, you are virtually unlimited in your color selection.

Thermal Transfer differs from Dye Sublimation in that Thermal Transfer uses Ink rather than Dye. Both Dye Sublimation and Thermal Ink (sometimes referred to as Resin) can be combined in one ribbon (see Figure 2). This ribbon is referred to as a YMCK Ribbon. The letter "K" is the designator for the color black in the printing industry.

 
yellow magenta cyan black yellow magenta cyan black

(fig. 2)
Why do you need a separate black panel, when you can create
black by mixing the three basic YMC colors together?
 

The answer to this question is simple. When black is created by mixing the YMC colors together it creates what is referred to as "Composite Black." Composite Black typically looks muddy or has a grayish tint when compared to Thermal Transfer (TT or resin) black. Composite Black is not recommended for printing bar codes since combining the three colors together does not produce the sharp edge many scanners require (this is invisible to the naked eye but can be observed under magnification). Composite Black is also invisible to IR scanners since there is no carbon in the dye. Since you may not know what type of scanner will be used, the rule is to always use TT (resin) black to print bar codes.

The printer is capable of printing in monochrome using a single color ribbon. These ribbons are less expensive than full color multi-panel ribbons and can be either dye or ink (thermal transfer). The most commonly used monochrome ribbon is "Black" but there are several other colors available including; Red, Green, Blue, and Yellow.
 
Monochrome
(fig. 3)
Dye Sublimation ribbons are preferred when you are printing pictures, since they can produce many shades of gray for a smoother look and a better picture quality. A resin black picture normally uses a dithered gray scale (gray made from a combination of pixels which limits the number of shades), producing a coarser, grainy look to the image.

Thermal Transfer (resin) ribbons should be used to print text, bar codes or single color graphics such as simple logos. Black monochrome ribbons are represented by the letter "K" followed by a lower case "r or d", (Kr or Kd). The "r" designates a Thermal Transfer ribbon with resin ink. The "d" designates a dye sublimation ribbon.

Magnetic Stripe Encoding

Magnetic stripe cards have been in existence since the early 70's when they were used on paper and film-based ID cards as well as credit cards. Magnetic stripe technology is widely used throughout the world and remains the dominant technology in the United States for transaction processing and access control. Other technologies such as PDF bar codes and smart chip cards are now capturing part of the magnetic stripe market since they can hold more information.


Magnetic Stripe Plastic Card


Magnetic stripe encoding terms:

Coercivity
A technical term used to designate how strong a magnetic field must be to affect data encoded on a magnetic stripe. Coercivity is measured in Oersteds (Oe). Coercivity is the measure of how difficult it is to encode information in a magnetic stripe.

HiCo
Abbreviation for High Coercivity. HiCo magnetic stripes provide the highest level of immunity to damage by stray magnetic fields. They are more difficult to encode than LoCo magnetic stripes because the encoding requires more power. HiCo magnetic stripe cards are slightly more expensive for this reason.

LoCo
Abbreviation for Low Coercivity. Easier to encode and slightly less expensive than HiCo magnetic stripe cards.

Selecting which type of magnetic stripe to adopt depends on how the card is to be used. Will the magnetic stripe be used daily, once a month, or just a couple of times a year? The chart below shows some of the applications where magnetic stripes are used and which stripe is common for that application.

Applications

LoCo

HiCo

Usage

Access Control

X

daily

Retail Customer
Loyalty Cards

X

weekly

Membership Cards

X

weekly/monthly

Time and Attendance

X

daily

Debit/Credit

International

United States

weekly/monthly

Drivers License

X

Occasionally, but HiCo required by most states.

The easiest way to determine visually if a stripe on a card is HiCo or LoCo is by the color. HiCo stripes are black and LoCo stripes are a lighter brown. Magnetic stripe readers are "blind" as to whether a stripe is HiCo or LoCo and are designed to read both.

Another term often used is Stripe-up and Stripe-down. Stripe-up means the magnetic stripe is on the front of the card and Stripe-down means the magnetic stripe is on the back of the card. This information is important when ordering a printer since the magnetic encoder must be installed differently for Stripe-up and Stripe-down models at the factory. The most common is Stripe-down.

The Encoders follow the ISO standard for encoding, but can be changed via the Microsoft Windows™ driver to enable proprietary encoding. Proprietary encoding offers greater security and most readers can also be easily reprogrammed to read custom encoding.

Smart Cards
 

There are a wide variety of contact and contactless smart cards currently in use. The Terms "Smart Chip Card, IC Card, and Smart Card" all refer to the same type of card. Smart cards have a chip embedded in them which can be programmed. Smart cards can store over 100 times more information than a magnetic stripe and they can be reprogrammed to add, delete or rearrange data.

Smart cards were invented in Europe in the 1970s and were in wide use in Western Europe by the early 80s. Smart cards are an easy, inexpensive way for European businesses to do off-line transaction verification. The reason for off-line verification is preferred is the high cost of telecommunications throughout Europe. The United States has been slow to implement smart cards because it would require replacing the widely installed magnetic stripe card reading equipment with smart card readers. The cost of having the current magnetic stripe readers "on-line" via telecommunications is relatively inexpensive in the U.S. compared to the rest of the world

 


Microprocessor Smart Card

 

The second type of smart card contains both a microprocessor as well as memory. These cards can store massive amounts of information, plus the micro-processor enables the card to make it's own decisions regarding the information stored.

Both types of chips can be addressed by the card printers since they all offer an optional smart card contact station. The printer brings the card into the contact station and then passes programming signals from an external programmer to encode the smart chip.

Contactless smart cards and proximity cards utilize various short and long range RFID technologies to write and read. Many card printers print on these kinds of smart cards. Encoding or programming the electronic devices on these cards is typically accomplished by an external encoding or programming device, but contactless smart card encoders integrated into the card printer are becoming increasingly available.


Card Durability and Security

Various types of materials are used to protect plastic cards. Overlay varnishes, holograms, patch overlaminates, and 3M™ Secure Card materials provide card durability and security, depending on user requirements.
 

Material

Card Life

Durability

Security

Overlay Varnish

Up to 2 years

Minimal

Overlay Varnish
with Hologram

Up to 2 years

Minimal

Visual

Clear Patch
Overlaminate

Up to 5 years

High

Patch Overlaminate
with Hologram

Up to 5 years

High

Visual

3M™ Secure
Card Material

Up to 10 years

Maximum

Visual
Retroreflective
UV

Card durability has to do with how well the card withstands various forms of environmental stress. They include resistance to abrasion, such as passing the card through a magnetic stripe or bar code reader, protection from image fading when exposed to sunlight, and resistance to damage when immersed in water or exposed to chemicals.

Another important factor in applications such as drivers licensing is resistance to tampering, alteration, and/or replication. With the use of protective materials such as overlaminates or Secure Card materials, cards can be constructed to eliminate the potential of tampering and alteration.

Card security means that the card can be verified for authenticity. Techniques include the application of overlay varnish or overlaminate materials with hologram images or the use of Secure Card media. Use of these materials in constructing cards makes replication by anyone without access to the custom hologram image materials virtually impossible.


Telephone: 305-436 1001 - Fax: 305-436 1004 - E-Mail: Sales@SerranoRey.com
Serrano Rey Enterprises Inc. 1909 NW 108 Ave. - Miami, Florida, USA 33172