I work as a global marketing and communications manager for Ultra Electronics Manufacturing card systems. I'm French and have now been living in the UK for 10 years. I graduated in business communications from the University of Rennes in France and post-graduated in International Public Relations at the University of Hertforshire, UK. I very much enjoy the creative side of my job, and most of all, the writing bit.
A finished ID card is built up from:
- A blank card
- The printed image
- An overcoat or lamination layer.
The printed image is created with the dye film ribbon. For color printing, inside a dye-sublimation printer is a roll of transparent ribbon with a repeating series of Yellow (Y), Magenta (M), Cyan (C), Black (K), and Clear (O) panels. The YMC panels contain thermally sensitive dyes; by combining varying amounts of these dyes, any color in the spectrum can be created, from white (no dye transferred) to Black (full transfer of each of the three dyes).
The Black and Clear panels are also used in this thermal printing process, but they operate in a different way called “Mass transfer” in which all of the material (In this case a plastic resin rather than a dye) is transferred once the carrier ribbon reaches the required transfer temperature. The black resin is used to apply dense black text and barcodes on top of the YMC color image, and the clear panel is used to put a protective overcoat over the entire printed image.
For extra protection, sometimes a lamination layer is added onto the card after printing. This is normally a 0.6 mil or 1 mil thick layer, which protects the card from scratching. Lamination is usually only required for high-wear usage such as cards that are swiped daily through access control readers.
Visit the Ultra Magicard website to find out more about ID cards, the different printers available, and the applications they are used in.
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