ID Card Printers

[Sonic007]

Hi all,

 

Does anyone have their own ID card printers?

 

We currently use Mifare cards on our entry system and have to send off to get our new cards printed.

I'd like to see how much it would cost if we did it in house and it would be faster too.

 

I'm guessing we could just buy the cards from the company and then print them ourselves.

 

What is everyone using and do you recommend any printers? Cost?

 

Many thanks.

[Aprice]

Across a few jobs I've used the Evolis Primacy units and IDP Card Printers.

 

My go to now is the IDP card printers, they've just been rock solid, the last one I put in was a Smart 51 which was about £700-800, they do some alternatives that are a bit cheaper.

 

Just make sure you give whichever unit you buy a clean every so often using the cleaning cards or they seem to get a bit messed up.

 

The two Evolis primacy machines I used just keep jamming up and leaving streaks all over the cards whatever we did.

 

Thanks,

 

Alex

[Sonic007]

Many thanks Aprice. I will definately check those out.

[localzuk]

Another Evolis Primacy user here. We're on our second one as we wore the first one out after about 5 years of heavy use.

 

We buy our cards from Smartcard Store generally. We also use ID Card Center as well for some kit.

[howartp]

Yeah we've got two Evolys Primacy printers, plus one brand new Magicard 600 in a box which i've not got round to hooking up yet.

 

Main thing is to pay attention to the software and driver settings, regardless of the printer you get.

 

300 Student cards (mono duplex) printed with barely a failed print last week.

 

Printing 180 Sixth Form cards yesterday took an hour of faffing because they kept jamming - I then remembered the time delay settings. Sixth Form cards are colour so take 4 times longer than mono, but the software was trying to load and encode the next card before the first had finished.

 

For colour simplex, 5 seconds pre-encode and 25-seconds pre-print works nicely leaving 3 seconds between card-eject and card-load.

[Chris_Cook]

We use the Magicard Enduro 3e which works well. I think the Magicard 300 is the current version of that.

[Sonic007]

Thanks all. I'm going to check them all out and get one ordered next week.

[Duranis]

We have a Magicard Pronto that has been here for at least 10 years. It's only single side printing and we only use it for staff cards but it has been absolutely bulletproof. The one time I had an issue with one of the sensors (way after it was out of warranty) I contacted the manufacturer to see if I could buy a replacement part from them. They sent me a couple of them free of charge and followed up to make sure that it solved the problem.

 

Would definitely recommend them unless you are printing out hundreds of cards regularly in which case it would probably be a bit slow.

 

Edit: We buy our cards with the mag strip pre-encoded and print on them. For the number we need it works out cheaper and is less faff., Again if you are doing a lot you probably want to get something with a built in encoder.

Edited September 3, 2021 by Duranis

[DeGrimmy]

We use the Magicard Enduro 3e which works well. I think the Magicard 300 is the current version of that.

We also use the Magicard Enduro 3e. It's a little squeakier than when we first got it a few years back, but it still works perfectly well.

[bushby]

I have 2 HPD5000 printers, one is just a printer the other is card printer and laminator. Main one the with the laminator module is based in my office central trust office the other is at our main senior school with sixth form, alot quicker to get but have an annoying bug where they never stay online on the network simple repatch and ready to go again but there is alot of fine tuning on them to get the cards ace, I have also gone red neck and just put one of our card readers at the end to scan the card as it finishes printing/laminating. Just got to set up something to send the card details to me now

[Sanchez]

I use a zebra series 3 printer, had it for about 8 years and never missed a beat. It's only single sided but does mag encoding as it was originally for dinner cards before we went biometric.

We have a net2 access system here but instead of printing on the net2 cards we print on plain plastic cards with a badge holder that holds two cards (printed ID card and blank net2 card) this allows us to reuse the net2 cards and replace faded ID cards easily. Last time I checked it costs us roughly £0.15 per card (£0.08 for a mono card) in the long run it has saved us a lot as we now print new staff cards, 6th form cards, exam ID cards etc every year.

[nadeem]

We used Zebra's double sided - printed thousands of cards over the years - would recommend that you get at least 2 though