About Plastic Cards Personalised plastic cards have a vast range of uses such as Loyalty cards, Membership cards, Discount cards, Identity cards, Security cards, general advertising and promotional cards, and much more. Research suggests that many of us will not readily throw away a plastic card no matter what the use or content. It has been suggested this is because the similarity to credit cards invokes a psychological importance. Retained cards are a permanent reminder of your products or services. This is evidenced by the thousands of companies who now use plastic cards to increase customer loyalty. Indeed plastic cards form a significant part of many direct mail campaigns. Card Manufacturing PVC is the most commonly used material for card manufacturing but the qualities, especially the durability and longevity, vary. These qualities of the PVC are given a vicat rating with an higher rating meaning higher durability. Many banking type cards are produced using high vicat PVC as they are expected to undergo regular use. The standard thickness of a PVC card is 760 micron but can be obtained thinner or thicker depending on your application. Standard dimensions are 86 x 54 mm with radius corners, but custom sizes can be produced. Other materials like high impact polystyrene and PET(G), which is more robust than PVC and is also biodegradable, are sometimes used. Additional resilience can be achieved by using laminated PVC cards which also yields a deep gloss finish. Printing Plastic Cards are printed prior to personalisation. The printing processes used are screen or litho with digital printing being attractive for smaller runs. Litho printing is the traditional method for producing large quantities. Screen printing can yield vivid colours and can use attractive metallic inks. Hot Foil printing can be added on top of pre-printed plastic cards to further enhance them and improve security by adding metallic and holographic foils. Methods of Personalisation Embossing Embossing is the raised characters found on all credit cards. The embossed characters are normally tipped with a coloured foil. Thermal Printing Thermal printing produces good quality characters on flat plastic cards and can even produce high quality graphics. The inks are transferred from ribbons that are available in a variety of colours. Inkjet Printing Inkjet printing offers an economical solution for high speed card personalisation. Some systems can personalise up to 20,000 plastic cards per hour. The down side is the quality of the print in comparison to thermal printing. Characters often appear jagged around the edges and clarity reduces with small font sizes. Magnetic Stripe Encoding For most plastic cards the magnetic stripe provides the mechanism for storing information. According to ISO standards the information can be stored on three tracks with track 2 being the most commonly used. Each of the three tracks can contain a different amount and type of information: Track 1 can contain up to 76 alphanumeric characters Track 2 can contain up to 37 numeric characters Track 3 can contain up to 164 numeric characters You will hear the terms HiCo and LoCo. These relate to the coercivity of the stripe and denote the strength of the magnetic field used to encode the tape. LoCo magnetic stripes are generally used for low security applications and HiCo for higher risk cards as the lower the coercivity then the easier it is to corrupt or over-write the information. Back >> CONTACT US when you are ready, we will be happy to help. KFSBF Ltd. Direct Mail and Print Specialists - Tel: 01371 832002 KFSBF LTD. Levetts Great Barn, Bardfield Road, Thaxted, Essex CM6 2LR. UK Tel: 01371 832002 Fax: 01371 832005 Mobile: 07786 436500 e-mail: sales@kfsbf.com Direct Mail Specialists | Data Integrity Processing | Custom Printing Company | Plastic Cards | Essex| UK