The Next Generation of ID card Printing: Image Integrity

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 discussed how environmental exposure can impact an ID badge when someone wears it in a visible way during work. In this post, we’ll focused on image integrity.

Part Two: Image Integrity

Organizations not using the latest printing technology often struggle to maintain the integrity of the original image when it’s printed on a card. For example, when an organization has a logo (such as company name, branding, etc.) or face that they want to print, they often have difficulty matching what they see on their monitor to what is printed on the card.

Matching skin tones is also a challenge. Some organizations create custom profiles for their printers as a workaround. However, the downside is that once one color is fixed, another is broken. Essentially, one color data point is right but others are modified. Other organizations change the colors of the image on the screen to print the desired color on the card. Even with these workarounds, dark colors from dye sublimation will continue to blend into adjacent colors on the card.

The retransfer printing process enables true over-the-edge printing, even on uneven surfaces such as smart cards. When coupled with 600 DPI color pigment ink technology, the retransfer printer produces higher quality images with true color. True color allows the original image on the screen to match the printed image on the card. The image below illustrates how the image on the screen can be matched to the image on the card via true color.