When selecting the best plastic card printer type for your business or organization, you have arrived at the right place. The plastic card printing type that is most suitable depends upon what type of business or company you are involved in and your budget. 

 

Overall, plastic card printers continue to come down in price as they are rapidly becoming the norm, replacing to a large degree what used to be standard, namely card laminating machines. Just another example of plastic displacing paper.  Clearly, plastic has advantages. It is more sturdy, more durable and a plastic badge can encode significantly more diverse types 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.

 

The plastic badge printer types are further individually outlined below:

Single side and double side plastic badge printers.The simplest type of plastic badge printer is a single side printer. When you do not need too much information imprinted, a single side will usually be sufficient. Using a single side makes the printer less expensive as it does not 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, double side plastic card printers are used.

 

Rewritable printers.To save money the advantage goes to the use of rewritable printers.  Rewritable plastic printers use a 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 upon up to 500 times. Rewritable printers commonly find use in colleges where a student can repeatedly update their information throughout the years, at ski resorts where a single card can be reused for numerous skiers, or in hotels to extend the stay of a guest, etc.

 

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.

 

Once you have decided what type of plastic card printer would work best for your company needs, then you should go to Plastic Card ID at Plastic Card ID | Your Destination for Plastic Cards & Plastic Card Printers