Plastic card types vs their suppliers and manufacturers
There are many types of plastic cards from gift through loyalty cards to business cards, there are also many companies supplying such cards, differing in size, assortment of cards supplied and their options, the scope of related services carried out on their own, a machine park, etc.
These companies produce many types of plastic cards for wholesale and individual personnel orders. Advertising agencies and printing companies are the basic plastic cards suppliers with basic properties and capabilities provide the most basic cards. Some printers produce smooth laminated and others matt some produce both types of these cards. Every well-known company boasts that their cards are never below standard thickness (i.e. 0.76 cm) and that plastic cards, as the name suggests, are not artificially bolded with paper or other materials, and that they offer a wide range of colors that can be put on the card. Such companies often use digital printing machines, while printshop also use offset machines.
More specialized companies are able to equip the plastic cards themselves with additional options such as magnetic stripe, which is beyond the competence of the advertising agency creating the project or printing house. Such companies we can call plastic cards manufacturers. Magnetic cards ( called cards with a magnetic strip) are cards in which the magnetic strip is the data carrier. The data are read when dragging the card in the reader reacting to changes in the magnetic field. There are cards on which the bar code is the data carrier – most often this type of card is used among discount and loyalty cards.
More advanced solutions are chip cards whose production is more complicated. Manufacturers of such cards offer them with an integrated circuit – production is more difficult and therefore more expensive, such cards allow to protect the user’s login process and to protect data and access control. Banks use such cards to produce payment cards. In addition to the cards mentioned above, there are also proximity cards, these cards have a microprocessor with memory and antenna, information is read without the need to insert the card into the reader, it is quick practical and convenient. Thanks to this, the advantage of such cards over magnetic cards is that they are simply more durable, because they are not subject to mechanical wear. Chip and transponder modules like Unique or Mifare are produced and deliverd by different eletronic factories.
As for production, a piece of cut plastic in the case of a bar code can be applied flat or convex varnish, in the case of cards with a magnetic strip it is also applied, while proximity cards have a built-in microprocessor inside a thin layer of plastic that does not interfere with its operation, and in the case of smart cards are different because some have an integrated circuit on the outside and some already inside like in the case of proximity cards.
A small card printer can be purchased by yourself within the limit of 1000 euros and you can make prints on the purchased white cards yourself, and you can also cut the card yourself using the available card cutting equipment. It makes 100 cards per minute.
