Plastic ID Card Printing – 5 Invisible Security Elements

Plastic ID card printing is experiencing a revival in popularity. The reason is simple. The digital revolution is getting away from paper-based information, and into other, digital, forms of information storage and processing which offer higher information density and more security. Plastic ID card printers are finding their use outside of banks and top secret government departments.

There are multitudes of visible features of plastic ID cards that make them secure enough for many purposes such as schools, team memberships, gyms, or buyer clubs.

When top security is an issue for you, then in this article we will go over the invisible security elements of plastic ID cards. They can carry multitude of information and can be extremely difficult to counterfeit. We will review here the most prevalent ones. They are: Magnetic stripes, Smart cards, Contactless smart cards, RFID chips and the member ID encoding.

Here are the top five invisible security elements of plastic ID card printers:

1. Magnetic stripes: The card holder information is encoded on the magnetic strip making it readable by the magnetic stripe readers. Unfortunately, of late, such readers or skimmers are also used to copy confidential holder information for the purpose of forgery.

2. Smart cards: These are silicon based chips implanted into the plastic card with metal pins on the surface. Upon contact with the smart card reader, the information can be read, written, and processed in the smart card. Smart cards can contain several megabytes of information which can be used for biometric purposes, such as storing the fingerprint information of the ID card holder, the retina scan information of the bearer and much more.

3. Contactless smart cards: Similar to smart cards but include an antenna which adds the capability of transferring the information wirelessly, over a short distance. Contactless smart cards are also termed proximity cards.

4. RFID chips: Radio Frequency Identification Chips are similar to contactless smart cards except that in general, they have no internal source of energy, can not process information, and can only respond to the incoming signals by providing the information encoded in them.

5. Member ID encoding in the photo ID card digits. This is a feature that is actually visible and invisible at the same time. While one can clearly see the digits on the front and back of the card, in credit cards, they are even embossed on the front, the actual encoding algorithm to encode the card number into the bank and account number is unknown.