Printing Cards at time of Manufacture
All cards of a manufacturing batch will be printed with the same artwork/design etc that is all fixed matter.

Cards are generally manufactured using four large sheets of PVC plastic that are bonded together under a ‘lamination’ (heat and pressure) process. In the first step of manufacturing the design for the face of the card is printed on one sheet and the reverse on another making up the ‘core’.

The printing of these sheets is done in volume using either a 4 color printing press up to 16 cards per sheet. The print may be applied by silkscreen print, offset print or a combination of these depending on the requirements of your design.

Once the core has been printed, the final two layers of transparent plastic are attached and laminated in order to protect the printed surface. The cards are punched from each sheet and additional features such as signature panels, magnetic stripes, foils and holograms are added.

Offset printing
Generally Offset printing is very good at printing detail (such as small fonts and fine objects). It is advisable to use Offset Printing where you have halftones and gradations.

Silkscreen printing
This process of printing is best suited when there are mettalic shades like silver/gold or only spot colors. 

OPRFID.com can provide a number of additonal options including:
• Signature Panels - transparent panels or opaque panels that can be plain white, standard pattern or custom pattern
• Magnetic Stripe - we can provide cards with either Hi-Coercivity (Hi-Co) or Lo-Coercivity (Lo-Co) depending on your needs
• Hot Foiling - the application of holograms and decorative foils involves the use of a die, heat and pressure Bar Codes
• Photo Identification - using digital card printing
• Ink Jet Printing/Serial Numbering - we can either print a default batch reference number or serial numbering on the card body   allowing manufacturing traceability
• Embossing
• Electrical Personalisation (encoding of chips) 

OPRFID.com has the ability to programme personalised data inside the card memory using our encoding facility. Our standard pricing excludes electrical personalisation, this is available on most memory, contactless and microprocessor cards that we stock.