The Digital Print Advantage for Bureau Services

We are all familiar with the standard way of personalising plastic cards. You take a blank white plastic card or smartcard, run it through a desktop printer and hey presto! That is the way you do it for instant issuance and that is the same technique used by bureau services right?

Well, now there is a better way for bureaux to personalise cards and it has many advantages for the customer. The process is known as sheet-fed or Digital Print process and it gives you the Digital Print Advantage.

Traditional desktop printing over-prints cards using ink ribbons. The lowest-cost process is simple wax-transfer which is fine for printing a name or card number or solid colour but it cannot print good quality photographs or colour images. The more common are dye-sublimation printers which give better control of colour but cannot print edge-to-edge.

Re-transfer printers overcome this by printing onto a transfer ribbon which is then applied to the card giving good quality edge-to-edge printing on uneven surfaces. But this quality comes at a big cost: the ribbons for a 2-sided, 4-colour card can add up to 50p to the cost of a blank card.

With digital print techniques, we avoid these high consumable costs. A set of card images are created from a scheme database and a sheet of 21 card images are printed in very high quality. This sheet is then used to make a set of 21 smartcards by laminating the chips & antennae to the printed sheet and between two protective layers. The whole array is then punched out to single cards. The process can print over 10,000 cards per hour, hundreds of times faster than re-transfer!