The Next Generation of ID card Printing: Small Font Printing

Entrust Datacard has applied Pigment Ink Technology — which has a proven track record in the financial card market — to the desktop retransfer printer. To date, the industry standard has been dye sublimation ink technology in both direct-to-card and retransfer printing. In this blog series, we’re exploring how the application of pigment ink technology combats the top three most common and costly challenges facing ID card programs.

In Part One, we discuss how environmental exposure can impact an ID badge when someone wears it in a visible way during work. In Part Two, we focus on image integrity and how new true color technology can match an on-screen image to the image on the card. In Part Three, the final post of this series, we’ll discuss small font printing.

Part Three: Small Font Printing

Fine detail text legibility is difficult to achieve in card printing with dye sublimation ink technologies. Kanji characters like Chinese, Japanese and Arabic —printing at less than 2 points — are especially difficult to render. Increasing font size or using a smaller subset of characters are potential workarounds for this issue, but they are not all available with 300 DPI.

At 600 DPI — pigment ink can deliver clarity of small font and fine line details on a card. With pigment ink, text is legible down to 1.5 point font (including Chinese characters and fine line requirements) without jagged lines.