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Foil Stamping Foil Applications are applied to cards with heat. Foils create impact much like a hologram. Special dies are made to hot stamp a solid image of a logo or words, or acronyms, etc. adding to the aesthetic image of your card. Consecutive Numbering: Consecutive numbers with up to 7 digits can be hot stamped anywhere on any color of card. The numbers are applied with heat and are offered in two sizes. Signature Panels Writable Panels: Both printable and signature panels are offered in white. We recommend that customers test sample printable cards in their printers before ordering, as each printer performs differently. A reasonable amount of sample cards will be provided for testing upon request. Signature panels may be applied both as a hot stamp and a screen printed process. Signature panels must be screen printed when the card thickness is less than .020, when multiple panels are required, or the panel size is other than standard. Clear panels are available by silk-screen method only. Scratch-off panels are applied through hot stamping or silk screening. Typically they are used to cover pin numbers on pre-paid phone cards or on lottery type cards used in product promotions. Magnetic Stripes LoCo or HiCo? ISO standards are used for magnetic stripe encoding and reading. The high coercivity magnetic stripe (2750 oersted and higher) will have far less failure than the low coercivity (300 oersted) stripe under normal usage. Data encoded on a LoCo card can be altered or destroyed by excessive use/wear, by contact with an ordinary household magnet (e.g. in a woman's pocketbook or wallet), by contact with other encoded cards, or by fraud. Failure can also happen with data encoded on a HiCo card, but the chances of accidental alteration are far lower. Customers should consider that every time a magstripe card fails to read, it means the data must be entered manually which incurs additional labor cost and time lost. Thus the initially higher cost of HiCo magnetic stripes will be recouped over short period of usage. For plastic cards that are intended for daily/frequent use, or for 12 months or more of infrequent use, we recommend the HiCo magnetic stripe and encoding. Size? Magnetic stripes are offered in five different sizes and are available in both low and high coercivity, and 300, 600, 2750, or 4000 oersteds.
Smart cards are credit card-sized plastic cards that contain relatively large amounts of information in an imbedded micro-chip. Smart cards differ from magnetic stripe cards in two ways: the amount of information that can be stored is much greater, and some smart cards can be reprogrammed to add, delete or rearrange data. There are several terms used to identify cards with integrated circuits embedded in them. The terms "chip card," "integrated circuit card", and "smart card" really all refer to the same thing. There are two types of smart cards. The first is really a "dumb" card in that it only contains memory. These cards are used to store information. Examples of this might include stored value cards where the memory stores a dollar value that the card user can spend in a variety of transactions. Examples might be phone, retail, or vending machines. Another example of a "dumb" card is the memory that is plugged into a Personal Computer (PC Card - used to be called PCMCIA). The second type of card is a true "smart" card in which a microprocessor is embedded in the card along with memory. The card actually has the ability to make decisions about the data stored on the card. The card is not dependent on the unit it is plugged into to make the application work. A smart purse or multi-use card is possible with this technology. |
