Full Color Plastic Cards

What is Full or Four Colors Plastic Card Printing?

Full Colour Plastic Cards printing is the process of printing high quality photographs or other documents in the full spectrum of color, people usually call it four color (CMYK) printing or full color printing. Full color printing has come a long way as technology continues to advance. In fact, the methods used today are so refined that it is possible to make copies that look just like the original photos.

Full color plastic cards are four color litho printed with Heidelberg machines. Unlike inkjet printers, thermal printers or color photocopiers, full color (C-M-Y-K) printing provides accurate, precised, detailed, natural, brilliant reproduction of your originals at a low cost-per-sheet. Our full color plastic card printing service has same process and quality as credit cards production, exactly like the credit cards.

Full color plastic card samples

Why choose full color plastic card printing?

Quality: Expensive professionally looking, texture and feel.
Pricing: There is not much of a difference between full color printing and other forms of commercial printing.
More info about full color plastic card:
Surcharge options: Barcode, magnetic strips, scratch off, hole/strip punch, signature strip, scratch off, die cut, metallic background colors, Embossing.
Thickness: 0.76MM ISO standard thickness (0.68mm, 0.54mm, 0.48mm, 0.40mm and 0.30mm cards are also available).
Size: 86mm*54mm with rounded corners.
Types: Loyalty cards, membership cards, discount cards, vip cards, gift cards and more.

What is the best way in showing off your plastic card? Definitely the more color you use the better in most cases. At Plastek Cards we do not charge extra if you are doing 2 colors or 4 colors on one or both sides. This gives you unlimited design ideas so that you don’t have to watch your budget just because you don’t want to spend more on your custom plastic card design.

In the plastic card industry there is a different form of terminology used for different things. Sometimes during the process of ordering you might know exactly what you want but do not exactly know what the product is called or the representative who is helping you is using these terms and you have no idea what they are referring to. Below you will find a list of terminology used in the plastic card printing industry.

Coercivity – This is a measure of the strength of a magnetic field. Fields that are generally used are low or high by the terms of LoCo and HiCo.

Encoding – Recording electronic information on to a magnetic stripe.

Degaussing – Magnetic stripe data erasing.

Digitizing – Conversion of non-textual data to digital form.

Embossing – This is the raised letters or numbers that can be put on a card that looks like the letters and numbers on a credit card. Letters have to be capitalized and can only be in small embossing and numbers can be small or large, however the space can only be 19 characters across including spaces.

ISO – International Standards Organization, central body for formation and dissemination of industry standards for all national standard bodies.

Lithography or Offset Printing –Most common process for plastic card printing based on the concept that oil and water is not compatible. The ink is the oil and the alkaline fountain solution represents the water. These are the two main components which must interact during the printing process, allowing the ink to adhere to the image area of a printing plate while the fountain solution repels the ink from the non-image area.

On-Line – A transaction on a terminal permanently connected to a network that is on-line to the card account.

Off-Line – A transaction via paper or reader not connected to a central system.

Personalization – Printing, encoding and programming a card with data specific to an individual.

PVC – Polyvinyl chloride, the most widely used plastic material.

Radio Frequency Card (RFID)

A proximity card in which the coupling between the card and the interface device is by radio.

These are some of the terms that are used in the plastic card printing industry. There are many more, but these are the most common ones that people have questions on.