How to Choose an ID Card Printer

There are maybe twenty card printers worth considering, they all look similar in photographs, and the spec sheets are written for people who already know what the words mean. This page is the version we would give you over the phone.

We have been specifying these machines for Illinois organizations since 1984. What follows is the order we actually work through, and it is deliberately not a feature comparison. Features are the last thing to look at, not the first.

Start with volume, and be honest about the peak

Volume decides more of this than any other single input, and the number that matters is your busiest period rather than your annual average.

A school issuing 4,000 cards across two weeks in August and 200 across the rest of the year has a 4,000-in-two-weeks problem, not a 4,200-a-year problem. Size for the crunch or you will be standing at a printer for a fortnight.

Work it out properly. Take the peak card count, divide by the working hours you actually have, and compare that against the seconds-per-card figure on the datasheet. A printer rated at 25 seconds a card does roughly 140 an hour in ideal conditions, and ideal conditions do not include reloading hoppers, clearing a jam, or the person operating it answering the phone.

One more thing that rarely makes a shortlist and should: for anything with a hard deadline, two moderate printers beat one fast one. They halve the queue and a fault on one becomes an inconvenience rather than a stoppage.

Direct-to-card or retransfer

This is the main fork, and it is simpler than the marketing makes it sound.

Direct-to-card printers press the ribbon straight onto the card surface. They are faster, cheaper to buy, and cheaper per card. They leave a very thin unprinted margin at the card edge, because the printhead cannot quite reach it. For the clear majority of programs this is the right answer, and we say so despite it being the cheaper option.

Retransfer printers print the image onto a clear film first, then fuse that film onto the card. The result runs right over the edge, sits under a protective layer, and handles uneven card surfaces gracefully. They cost more to buy and more per card, because you are buying two consumables instead of one.

Choose retransfer for three reasons and not otherwise: your cards carry a chip or antenna that makes the surface uneven, you need a genuinely premium or security-grade finish, or badge wear has become a recurring complaint. Our direct-to-card versus retransfer guide goes through the differences properly.

One side or two

Dual-sided printing costs more up front and it is almost always worth it.

The back of a card is genuinely useful space. Terms of use, an emergency number, a barcode, a return address, opening hours, a policy line. Printing it at issuance is far tidier than a sticker applied afterwards, and it stops the front of the card getting crowded with small print.

Some single-sided printers can be upgraded to dual-sided later and some cannot. If there is any chance you will want it, check that before buying, because the upgrade is usually cheaper than a second printer but only if the model supports it. The single-sided versus dual-sided guide covers when the second side earns its keep.

How close to the edge do you need to print

Direct-to-card printers leave a small unprinted border. Whether that matters depends entirely on your design.

A card with a white background and a photo in the middle will look identical either way. A card with a colored background, a full-bleed image, or a solid color band running to the edge will show a thin white line around the perimeter, and once you have noticed it you cannot stop noticing it.

If your design has color at the edge, either redesign with a white margin, or buy retransfer. Our edge-to-edge versus over-the-edge guide explains what each term actually means, because manufacturers use them loosely.

What the card has to do besides carry a photo

Encoding is where specifications go wrong, because it is the one thing that is expensive to add later and impossible to add on some models.

Decide up front whether the card needs a magnetic stripe, a contact smart chip, or a contactless credential, and whether it needs more than one. A card that opens a door and clocks a shift and pays at a till may need two technologies on the same piece of plastic.

If the card opens doors, the credential has to match your existing readers. We program HID credentials, covering HID Prox at 125 kHz, iCLASS SE and SR, and SEOS, in the common formats including 26-bit H10301 and 37-bit H10304. If you do not know what your readers are, tell us the reader model and we can usually identify it. The access credentials and encoding guide is the deep version, and our prox and access card programming service is what we do with it.

The practical rule: buy the encoder with the printer. Retrofitting is possible on many models and cheap on almost none.

Resolution, and when 600 dpi actually matters

Almost every card printer prints at 300 dpi and almost every card program is well served by it. Photographs, logos, text and barcodes all reproduce cleanly.

Higher resolution shows up in two places. Some printers offer an enhanced mode, typically 300 x 600 dpi, that sharpens fine text and small barcodes without a full resolution upgrade. True 600 dpi, which on our range means the retransfer models, makes a visible difference on microtext, fine security patterns, and very small type.

If your card is a photo and a name, 300 dpi is not a compromise. If it carries microtext as a security feature, or very small print, the higher resolution is doing real work.

Card handling, the part nobody reads

Hopper capacity does more for a busy issuance day than most headline features.

A 100-card input hopper means somebody reloads every 100 cards. During a rush that is a person standing at the machine. A 200-card hopper halves it, and dual input hoppers let you keep two card types loaded, which is useful when staff and visitor cards are different stock.

Output capacity matters if cards are collected in batches rather than handed over one at a time. A reject hopper is worth having wherever encoding is involved, because it separates failed cards automatically instead of mixing them into the good ones.

Accepted card thickness is worth checking against what you actually use. Most programs run 30 mil, which every printer here handles, but if you use thinner stock for visitor passes or thicker cards for lamination, confirm the range. Our guide to ID card sizes and thickness explains what a mil is, why 30 mil became the default, and where PVC and composite stock differ.

How it connects, and who shares it

USB is fine for a printer attached to one computer at one desk. It is a poor answer for anything shared.

Ethernet with an internal print server is what you want for a machine several people print to, or one sitting in a different room from the person issuing cards. It also makes the printer manageable from IT rather than dependent on one desktop being switched on.

Check driver support against the operating systems you actually run. This is a real constraint on older machines, and a printer that works perfectly but has no driver for a current OS is a printer at the end of its life. Our drivers and support section carries what we host.

Lamination, and whether you need it

A lamination module applies a clear or holographic patch over the finished card. It adds significant cost, both for the module and the patches.

It earns that cost in two situations. Where cards must survive years rather than months, a laminate roughly doubles working life. Where cards need to be hard to forge, a holographic overlaminate is one of the most effective and most easily verified security features available.

Government credentials, university staff cards and anything granting access to controlled areas are the usual candidates. A retail employee badge reissued every eighteen months is not.

What it costs to run, which is the number that gets forgotten

The printer is a one-off. Ribbons and cards are forever, and across five years they will usually cost more than the machine did.

Work out cost per card before you choose. Divide ribbon price by ribbon yield, add the card, add a share of the cleaning kit. Do that for each machine on your shortlist and the comparison often reverses: a cheaper printer with lower-yield or proprietary consumables can easily cost more over three years than a better one.

Our ribbon compatibility and yield guide lists the manufacturer's yield for every ribbon we carry, which is exactly the number this calculation needs. If you want, tell us your annual volume and we will run the comparison for you across whichever machines you are weighing up.

Which of ours suits which situation

Rough guidance rather than a rule, and we would always rather talk it through than have you buy from a paragraph.

Low volume, simple cards. The Magicard Pronto100 is small, quick and inexpensive to run, and suits a club, a small office or a front desk issuing modest numbers.

Mainstream single-sided work. The Evolis Zenius 2 and the Magicard 300 both handle steady issuance well and are easy for occasional operators to run.

Mainstream dual-sided work with encoding. The Evolis Primacy 2 and the Magicard 600 are the workhorses here, and cover most corporate, healthcare and school programs comfortably.

Higher volume direct-to-card. The Fargo DTC4500e brings a dual 200-card input hopper as standard and a 300 x 600 dpi mode, which suits larger sites and busier issuance.

Premium and security work. The Fargo HDP6600 and the Evolis Agilia are retransfer machines printing at 600 dpi over the edge. This is where you go for government-grade credentials, technology cards with uneven surfaces, and anything that needs to look and feel expensive.

Full specifications are on each product page in our ID card printer range, and the printer finder will narrow the list from your answers to the questions above.

Warranty, service, and who fixes it

Card printers need cleaning and they eventually need repair. Where that happens is worth deciding before you buy rather than after something breaks.

Manufacturer warranties vary more than people expect. Terms run from two to four years on the printer, and printhead cover ranges from a fixed period to lifetime cover with unlimited card passes on some models. Those warranties are almost always conditional on cleaning at the specified interval and on using the manufacturer's own consumables.

We are an authorized service center and we repair on our own bench in Woodridge, which means a fault is a phone call and a short trip rather than a shipping exercise. That matters more than it sounds when a printer goes down mid-issuance. See ID card printer repair for what that covers.

A short decision path

If you want the compressed version, it runs like this.

Work out your peak volume. If your design has color at the card edge or your cards carry chips that sit proud of the surface, look at retransfer; otherwise direct-to-card. Decide now whether you need the back of the card, and buy dual-sided if there is any doubt. Identify what your readers and clocks need and buy that encoder with the machine. Check the hopper size against how many cards you issue in a sitting. Calculate cost per card across your shortlist. Then choose.

If that leaves you between two machines, that is the point to call us. Tell us what you are badging, how many, and what your readers are, and we will give you a straight answer, including when the cheaper machine is the right one.

Software, and what actually comes in the box

A printer prints what it is sent. Something has to design the card and hold the cardholder data, and that something is card software.

Most printers ship with an entry-level design package. It is generally enough to lay out a card, place a photo, and print one at a time. Where it runs out is batch printing from a spreadsheet or database, capturing photos from a camera, encoding fields onto a chip or stripe as part of the print job, and keeping a record of who has been issued what.

If you are issuing more than a handful of cards, look at what the bundled software does before assuming it covers you. Upgrading later is straightforward but it is a cost that belongs in the original comparison rather than as a surprise afterwards. Our card software section covers the editions we supply and what separates them.

Worth being clear about scope: we supply and support the software and the equipment. We do not design your card artwork and we do not build or administer your cardholder database. Those sit with you, your designer, or your IT team. What we will do is make sure the printer, the cards and the software you buy actually work together, which is the part that usually goes wrong.

Previous-generation and refurbished machines

New is not always the right answer, particularly on a tight budget.

A previous-generation model that is still fully supported, still has current drivers, and still has consumables in production can be excellent value. The things to check are exactly those three: driver support for the operating systems you run, consumables still being manufactured, and whether the model is still serviceable with genuine parts.

Where we would be cautious is a machine near or past end of life. When a manufacturer discontinues a model, consumables usually remain available for a while and then do not. Buying into that at the wrong point means a working printer you cannot feed. Ask us before committing to anything older; we will tell you honestly where a given model sits.

The mistakes we see most often

All of these are cheap to avoid at the specification stage and expensive to fix afterwards.

Sizing to the average rather than the peak. The single most common one, and the reason people end up buying a second printer in year one.

Leaving encoding until later. Retrofitting an encoder is often possible and rarely cheap, and on some models it is not possible at all.

Comparing sticker prices instead of cost per card. The cheaper machine frequently costs more to run, and over three years that gap is bigger than the purchase difference.

Buying single-sided to save money, then wanting the back of the card. Check whether your chosen model can be upgraded before you decide.

Ignoring where the printer will live. These are office machines. Sited on a plant floor or next to a chalk bucket they will collect the dust that causes print faults.

Training one person. That person will be on holiday during your busiest week. Train two, and keep a one-page instruction sheet by the machine.

Designing the card without deciding how it will be worn. The slot punch orientation, the holder and whether anyone needs to read the role from a distance all change the artwork, and all of them are cheap now and a reprint later. Our badge accessories page covers the punch and holder chain, and badge buddy colors and roles covers the case where the badge has to be readable across a room.

Buying capability nobody asked for. Lamination, 600 dpi and dual-sided printing are all worth having when you need them and pure cost when you do not. Work from your actual requirement rather than the feature list.