ID Management Systems Blog » plastic cards

Plastic ID cards aren’t just for labelling people

admin — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 10:09:55 +0000

The most common use of the plastic card printers that we supply is for producing cards for people, cards that are used for things like ID cards, membership cards or loyalty cards.

That’s not all that plastic card printers can be used for though, over the years we’ve worked with people that have used the equipment that we supply for all kinds of different applications, like:

Labelling equipment on off-shore drilling rigs

Producing certificates of authenticity and guarantees to go with jewellery and watches

Labelling plumbing and heating pipes in houses

Printing neo-natal scans for expecting couples

Making special luggage tags for flight crew

These are just a few of the innovative applications that our customers have found for our plastic card printers. If you’d like to find out more about card printers or any of the other equipment that we supply, call ID Management Systems on 0800 408 1471 and we’ll be happy to help.

Magicard Pronto plastic card printer

admin — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 10:08:30 +0000

We hear from lots of people that want a low cost plastic card printer for producing small volumes of high quality plastic cards. It’s understandable to want to get a printer as cheaply as possible, but you also want to make sure that you get a good plastic card printer that will produce good cards.

The Magicard Pronto is a great little card machine. This plastic card printer is designed for users who are looking to get a start at producing their own plastic cards and are looking to produce perhaps a couple of hundred cards a year in small volumes.

Despite being low-cost, the Magicard Pronto doesn’t economise where it matters. The print from this machine is great 300 dpi that is comparable with machines that cost twice as much as it.

If you’d like to find out more about the Magicard Pronto or any of the other plastic card printers that we supply, call ID Management Systems on 0800 408 1471 and we’ll be happy to help.

Magicard Pronto

What types of cards can plastic card printers print onto?

admin — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 09:19:41 +0000

Unlike most printers which print onto paper, the ID card printers that we supply are designed specifically for printing onto plastic. The most common cards are CR80 in size, which is an international standard that most people know as “credit card sized”, roughly 86*54mm. Other sizes are available, but anything larger than CR80 requires extremely specialist and potentially expensive equipment to print on. The most common thickness for cards is 760 micron (slightly over three quarters of a millimetre), but many plastic card printers can handle a range of different card thicknesses, typically from about 250 microns to 1mm.

The majority of plastic cards are made from PVC but alternative materials are available, like PET (polyester) and BioPVC, which is a special form of PVC that is designed to biodegrade and is a good choice for people who are particularly concerned about their environmental credentials.

If you’d like to find out more about the types of plastic cards that are available for your printer, call ID Management Systems on 0800 408 1471 and we’ll be happy to help.

Bulk orders for pre-printed plastic cards

admin — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 10:09:19 +0000

If you’re looking to produce small volumes of printed plastic cards then desktop card printers like the Evolis Pebble 4 are usually the best option, they give you the ability to produce durable plastic cards with vibrant colour printing in very small quantities without increasing your unit cost.

If you’re looking to produce larger numbers of cards with the same design then pre-printed cards can be a very good option. Say, for example, that you need to produce 20,000 cards that will all have the same colour print but be individualised in black, then having the cards lithographically pre-printed for you to individualise them using a dye-sub plastic card printer like the Pebble 4 can work out significantly cheaper, as well as meaning that your plastic cards will have an exceptionally high level of printing, higher than any standard desktop machine would

There are lots of situations where having your plastic cards pre-printed is a very good idea. If you’d like to discuss your requirement with us and see what the best way for you to get your cards produced would be, call ID Management Systems on 0800 408 1471 and we’ll be happy to help.

Urgent requirements for plastic card supplies

admin — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 09:23:02 +0000

In an ideal world, we all get plenty of time to plan ahead and can make sure that we never run out of anything we need. Of course, more often than not the world isn’t ideal. Problems happen, things run out and awkward situations occur.

We understand that sometimes people can’t have planned ahead to get everything that they need so if you tell us that something is truly urgent we will always make an extra effort to help our customers and get them what we need.

We carry a large amount of stock of many different items that we supply, plastic cards, card printers, printer ribbons, smart cards and card accessories, and we will always do our best to make sure that we get things dealt with as fast as possible, often despatching your order on the day that it is placed with us.

If you’ve got an urgent requirement for plastic card equipment, call ID Management Systems on 0800 408 1471 and we’ll do our best to help.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from ID Management Systems

admin — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 09:13:52 +0000

With only a couple of days left before most of us have finished for the year, we at ID Management Systems are looking back at another great year. Despite the ongoing difficulties in the global economy and lots of companies having great difficulties, ID Management Systems are still growing and we’re looking forward to 2012 being even better.

In the last year we’ve worked with thousands of different customers from organisations of all types and sizes, from sole traders to multi-national corporations, governments, hospitals, charities and universities.

We’ve supplied thousands of plastic card printers and hundreds of thousands of cards and card accessories to people from all over the world, including lots of customers in the UK and people from places like Libya, Australia, Spain, Malta, Nigeria, France, Canada and India.

We’d like to thank all of our customers for helping to make 2011 such a great year for us and we look forward to working with them and many new customers over the course of 2012.

Encourage customer loyalty with plastic cards

admin — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 17:18:22 +0000

In the current economic climate, even more so than usual, businesses are looking for ways to encourage and reward loyalty from their customers. A lot of companies opt for just working to be the cheapest, which will get you so far but only at the cost of your profits. What lots of companies do instead is to offer loyalty cards to their best customers.

Loyalty cards have become increasingly popular over the last few years and a well handled loyalty scheme is a great way of encouraging your customers to keep coming back to you and to offer them incentives for doing so. They also mean that you can keep your company in their mind so that whenever they think about the service that you offer, they think of you, which is just how you want it to be!

If you’d like to find out more about using a plastic card printer to produce loyalty cards for your business, call us on 0800 408 1471 and we’ll be happy to help.

ID Management Systems – a supplier of ID products that knows what it’s talking about

admin — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 09:21:37 +0000

With the increased adoption of plastic ID cards throughout the world in the last decade, more and more companies have started selling this type of equipment. There are lots of people that have joined this industry in the hope of getting a share of the millions of pounds spent every year by UK companies and the public sector on ID cards, card printers and accessories. This means it is an increasingly crowded market and it can make it difficult for people to get what they need.

ID Management Systems have been supplying identification equipment for more than fifteen years now, so we have a wealth of knowledge and experience that can help you to make the right decisions and get the best equipment for the job at competitive prices. We’ve supplied systems designed to produce tens of thousands of cards and small businesses who just needed a couple of ID cards, and everything in between.

If you’ve got a requirement for identification equipment and would like to benefit from dealing with a company that has been in this industry for more than fifteen years, call ID Management Systems on 0800 408 1471 and we’ll be happy to help.

Try coloured plastic cards

admin — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 08:32:30 +0000

The majority of the plastic cards that we supply are plain white PVC that’s designed for people to over-print in full colour, but cards come in a very wide range of different colours that can be very useful for different applications

We stock Fotodek Premier cards in a range of about sixteen standard colours, including red, blue, green and black and even metallic silver and gold. If you need more than a few hundred, you can even get them custom made in whatever colour you want.

While we can’t recommend printing in full colour on this kind of card, simply because the strong base colour will make it hard to render coloured over-printing clearly, they are a very good choice for some uses.

A particular favourite of ours is using coloured cards and over-printing using metallic foil ribbons, which is an easy way to produce very nice membership cards for organisations where a photo isn’t necessary.

If you’d like to find out more about ways you can use coloured cards with your plastic card printer, call us on 0800 408 1471 and we’ll be happy to help.

More advanced options for pre-printing cards

admin — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 08:47:51 +0000

In addition to adding things like back-prints and signature strips to cards we also have access to a range of different print techniques that mean we can produce printed cards done the best way to get the result that you need as economically as possible.

If you’re looking to produce something like a student ID or travelcard, that means you need to create a visually appealing card that also needs to be as hard to copy as possible, pre-printed cards give you access to a much higher level of detail and print quality that is available with standard printers and also mean that all you have to worry about doing with your printers is actually individualising the cards.

Pre-printed cards are based on the exact specification you need, which means that the costs are also worked out individually for your requirement. If you’d like to find out more about getting pre-printed cards for your organisation, call ID Management Systems on 0800 408 1471 and we’ll be happy to help.