Plastic Cards
Visible personalisation of plastic cards can be done in two ways. Thermal card printing or card embossing. Identisys are the UK distributor for CIM who manufacture and supply professional plastic card personalisation equipment to banks and card bureaus around the world. Our range of multi-modular Pro-Series systems for high volume card production facilitate the linking of personalisation systems such as embossers and thermal printers to mailing systems and multi-card feeders for complete end-to-end card personalisation, encoding and mailing.
Plastic Card Embossing – The process of creating raised characters on the surface of a plastic card using a mechanical die punch process.
Card Tipping – The process of applying a colour to the embossed characters on a card. A coloured foil (black, silver or gold) is applied to the characters using heat and pressure.
Card Encoding – The process whereby data and/or information is encoded onto either a magnetic strip or a chip. Chips can be either surface mounted or within the card for contactless applications, the most common application of this is Mifare cards. Identisys also offer hardware to fulfil other card processing requirements such as;
Some Common Uses of Plastic Cards
Thermal Card Printing – The process of thermally transferring coloured dye from printer ribbons to plastic cards to create the required image, text or barcode. Typically pre-printed cards are personalised with the customers’ personal information using a monochrome ribbon however a YMCKO (Yellow, Magenta, Cyan, Black & Overlay) ribbon can be used to produce full colour images.
- Bank Cards
- Loyalty Cards
- Membership Cards
- ID cards
- Access Cards
Plastic Card Embossing – The process of creating raised characters on the surface of a plastic card using a mechanical die punch process.
Card Tipping – The process of applying a colour to the embossed characters on a card. A coloured foil (black, silver or gold) is applied to the characters using heat and pressure.
Card Encoding – The process whereby data and/or information is encoded onto either a magnetic strip or a chip. Chips can be either surface mounted or within the card for contactless applications, the most common application of this is Mifare cards. Identisys also offer hardware to fulfil other card processing requirements such as;
- Infill - Printing of data onto a plastic card using an embosser, normally used to print security codes onto signature panels of bank cards
- Mailing - Matching of personalised cards to personalised letters, folding, inserting into an envelope and sealing.
- Combi Systems - Some systems carry out a single process (emboss, print or mail) however we also offer a Combi system that is able to carry out a number of processes within the hardware. These units can then automatically feed other systems to provide end-to-end solutions.