Card solutions for your world.

Every organization that issues ID cards is solving the same handful of problems, but the weight on each one changes completely depending on what you do. A school and a warehouse both need a photo badge that opens a door. One of them issues four thousand of them in a fortnight and the other needs them to survive being ground against a forklift. Same equipment, entirely different specification.

This page covers what card programs have in common and the decisions that separate them. If you already know your sector, the pages linked below go into the specifics. If you are starting from nothing, read this first and the rest will make more sense.

We have been fitting Illinois organizations with card systems since 1984, which is long enough to have seen most of the ways these programs go right and wrong.

The four questions that decide everything

Almost every card program specification comes down to four answers. Get these right and the equipment choice becomes obvious. Get them wrong and you will be buying twice.

How many cards, and when? Not the annual total, the peak. A school issuing four thousand cards in August has a completely different requirement from a business issuing four thousand across a year.

What does the card have to do besides identify someone? Open a door, clock a shift, pay for lunch, check out a book, authorize a refund at a till. Each of those adds something to the card and usually to the printer.

How long does the card need to last? A conference badge lives for three days. A municipal credential might be expected to last five years. That difference drives stock, lamination, and print method.

Who is going to run it? A dedicated person in an ID office is a different proposition from whoever happens to be on the front desk at six in the morning. Simple equipment that anyone can operate often beats better equipment that only one person understands.

Volume: the peak is the number that matters

The most common specification mistake we see is sizing a printer against the annual average rather than the busiest week.

Work it out properly. Take your peak issuance period, divide by the hours you have available, and check the printer can keep up with the seconds-per-card figure on its datasheet. A machine that prints a card every 25 seconds does about 140 an hour in ideal conditions, and ideal conditions do not include reloading the hopper or fixing a jam.

Two smaller printers frequently beat one larger one for peak work. They halve the queue, and when one stops the other keeps going. For anything with a hard deadline, that redundancy is worth more than raw speed.

Hopper capacity is the quiet one. A 100-card input hopper means somebody stands at the machine reloading during a rush. A 200-card hopper halves that. It rarely appears on a shortlist and it makes a real difference on the day.

What goes on the card besides a face and a name

The printed side is the easy part. The decision that costs money is what the card carries that a machine can read.

A barcode is printed, so it costs nothing extra to produce and works with cheap scanners. It wears with the card and it is trivially copied, so it suits libraries and time clocks rather than security.

A magnetic stripe is cheap, universally understood, and still very common in point of sale and older hotel locks. It needs an encoder in the printer and stock with a stripe on it.

A proximity credential at 125 kHz works through a wallet or a glove and is the workhorse of physical access control.

Contactless smart credentials at 13.56 MHz do the same job with more security and more capability.

Decide this before buying a printer. Adding an encoder later is possible on many models but almost never cheaper than specifying it once.

Direct-to-card or retransfer

This is the main fork in printer selection and it is simpler than it sounds.

Direct-to-card prints straight onto the card surface. It is faster, cheaper to buy, and cheaper per card. It leaves a very thin unprinted border at the edge. For the large majority of programs it is the correct answer, and we say so even though it is the less expensive option.

Retransfer prints onto a film and then fuses that film to the card. The image runs over the edge with no border, it sits under a protective layer so it resists wear, and it copes gracefully with cards that have a chip sitting slightly proud of the surface. It costs more to buy and more per card.

Choose retransfer when you need a genuinely premium or secure-looking credential, when your cards carry technology that makes the surface uneven, or when badge wear has become a recurring complaint. Otherwise choose direct-to-card and spend the difference on better stock. Our printer buying guide works through this in more detail, and the printer finder will narrow the field by your answers to the four questions above.

Card stock, thickness, and stripes

Standard 30 mil PVC in CR-80 size is what the overwhelming majority of programs use. It is the same size and thickness as a bank card, which is why it fits every wallet, badge holder, reel and clip on the market.

Thinner 10 mil stock exists and is cheaper, but it does not survive daily handling and will not work with most encoders. It has its uses in short-lived visitor passes and very little else.

If the card carries a magnetic stripe, use high-coercivity stock. Low-coercivity stripes lose their encoding to the stray magnetic fields in phone cases, bag clasps and locker doors, and the failure looks exactly like a broken reader. Everything we stock with a stripe is high-coercivity for that reason.

Settle slot orientation before you finalize the artwork, not before you order stock. A vertical slot suits a lanyard, a horizontal slot suits a clip, and the design has to leave that area clear either way. Punch after printing: most card printers will not print on a card that already has a hole in it, so pre-punched stock and in-house printing do not go together. The card and credential range covers plain stock, magnetic stripe, and programmed access cards.

Access credentials, and what we program

If the card opens doors, it needs a credential your readers accept, encoded with your facility code and a card number in a format your access control system understands.

We program HID credentials. That covers HID Prox at 125 kHz, iCLASS SE and SR, and SEOS, in the common Wiegand formats including 26-bit H10301 and 37-bit H10304. If your readers take HID credentials, we can supply cards already programmed to your facility code and card range, so they arrive ready to print and issue rather than needing a separate encoding step.

The 37-bit format is worth knowing about if you have been issuing for years and are running short of numbers in a 26-bit range. Full detail is on the prox and access card programming page, and the access credentials and encoding guide explains facility codes, formats and the difference between proximity and smart credentials without assuming you already know.

If you are not sure what technology your readers use, tell us the reader model. We can usually work it out from the model numbers rather than guessing.

Print in house, or send the work out

This is a genuine decision with a real answer, and it is not always the one that sells more equipment.

Owning a printer wins when issuance is continuous, when you need a card in somebody's hand immediately, or when replacements are frequent. A badge printed while a new starter waits, or a replacement handed over in two minutes, solves a problem that an order placed with a supplier simply cannot.

Sending the work out wins when issuance is a once-a-year batch. If you print two hundred cards each renewal season, a printer sits unused for fifty weeks and the money would have been better spent elsewhere. We print and encode cards and ship them finished; details are on the card printing service page.

The most common answer for larger organizations is both: send the big scheduled run out, and keep a modest printer for the daily reality of new starters, replacements and contractors. If you tell us your numbers we will give you an honest view of where that line falls for you.

What it actually costs to run

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

Ribbons are consumed per card, so the arithmetic is simple once you know the yield. A 300-print ribbon covers 300 cards. Work out your annual issuance, divide by the ribbon yield, and you have your ribbon budget. Our ribbon and supply range lists the yield on everything we carry precisely so this can be worked out before you commit.

Do that calculation before choosing a printer, not after. A cheaper machine that takes expensive proprietary consumables can easily cost more over three years than a better one that does not.

Keeping the printer alive

Nearly every card printer fault we are called about traces back to cleaning. Dust and card debris build up on the rollers and the printhead, and the first symptom is a line or a smudge that was not there yesterday.

Clean with every ribbon change. It takes a couple of minutes and it is the single highest-return habit in this whole business. Manufacturers publish an interval, and we list it alongside the cleaning kits along with what each kit contains.

Where the printer lives matters too. Card printers are office equipment. Sited on a plant floor or next to a chalk bucket they will collect exactly the particulate that causes print faults.

When something does break, we are an authorized service center with a bench in Woodridge, so repairs are done with genuine parts rather than guesswork. See ID card printer repair, and drivers and support for the driver and software problems that account for a surprising share of what looks like hardware failure.

How the sectors actually differ

The principles above are common. The weighting is not. These are the sector pages, and each one covers the decisions that matter most in that environment.

Schools and universities are defined by the academic calendar. Mass issuance in a few August weeks, one card doing identity, library, meal plan and door access, and a constant stream of replacements from students who lose things.

Healthcare treats the badge as clinical equipment. Photo quality matters because patients read it, badges take a beating from constant handling and sanitizer, and agency and shift staff need reissue at any hour.

Government and municipal programs put security features first. Holographic overlays, retransfer printing, long card life measured in years, and a formal procurement process that needs a specification written properly the first time.

Corporate and enterprise is about one badge opening every door, brand consistency across multiple sites, and keeping pace with hiring and, more importantly, with offboarding.

Events and conferences is the only program with a deadline measured in hours. Throughput, redundancy, and not running out of ribbon halfway through registration.

Hospitality runs two programs at once: high-volume guest key cards that must match a lock system somebody chose years ago, and low-volume back-of-house staff badges.

Manufacturing and warehousing is an environment problem. Abrasion, gloves, cold, contractors, agency labor, and badges that need to be read at speed by someone carrying a box.

Non-profits and membership organizations face the same requirements on a fraction of the budget, which makes the buy-or-outsource decision the most important one on the page.

Fitness and clubs live and die on check-in throughput at peak hours, with high member churn and a strong case for issuing a card on the spot when somebody joins.

Retail usually runs two or three card programs that were never planned together: employee IDs, point of sale swipe cards for tills, and sometimes gift or loyalty cards.

Visitor management cuts across all of the above. It is the one program with no schedule at all: badges issued one at a time, on demand, by whoever is covering the desk, which makes simplicity and stock on hand matter more than print quality.

If your situation is not on that list, it is very likely we have done something close to it. Tell us what you are badging and we will tell you what it needs.

The mistakes we see most often

A short list, all of them cheap to avoid and expensive to fix afterwards.

Sizing to the average instead of the peak. Covered above, and still the most common one. The busy week is the requirement.

Buying the printer before deciding what the card must do. Encoders are far cheaper specified up front than retrofitted, and some cannot be added at all.

Ignoring the running cost. A cheaper printer with expensive consumables often costs more across three years. Do the ribbon arithmetic before you choose.

Low-coercivity magnetic stripes. They fail in pockets next to phones and the symptom looks like a broken reader, so the wrong thing gets blamed for months.

Buying pre-punched cards for a program you print yourself. Most card printers will not print on a card that already has a hole in it. Print first, punch second.

Skipping cleaning. Almost every fault we are called out to starts here, and a cleaning kit costs a fraction of a service visit.

Only one person who knows how to run it. That person will be on holiday during your busiest week.

What we do, and what we do not

Worth being plain about, because it saves everyone time.

We supply printers, ribbons, film, cards and credentials. We program HID access credentials to your facility code and card range. We print and encode finished cards and ship them. We repair printers on our own bench as an authorized service center, and we help with drivers and setup.

We do not design your card artwork, we do not migrate your cardholder data, and we do not set up or administer your access control system or its database. Those sit with you, your designer, or your access control integrator. We will happily tell you what the printer and the cards need to be so that whoever does own those pieces has something that works.

We also only program HID credentials. If your system uses something else, we would rather tell you that at the start than sell you cards that will not open your doors.