Smartcard Artwork

[daverob]

Thanks to everyone who has worked on artwork for printing on smartcards for the Card Reader Emulator project. Unfortunately there is a slight problem with the new batch of cards, which means that many of the current designs are going to have significant image dropouts for the forseeable future.

The problem is that where the smartcard chip is mounted on the card, the rear surface of the card is not completely flat. The card printer requires a good contact between the card surface and the ribbon/print head, so there will always be print dropouts wherever there are flaws in the surface flatness.

These flaws are inherent in the manufacturing process of the card but some cards are better than others. It appears that my first batch of cards were exceptional examples and their flatness was far from the norm. Even then I was getting a bit of a lightening of the image printed over the back of the smartcard chip, and about one in ten cards had severe image dropouts.

The latest batch of blank cards are more typical, and pretty much all of them have a completely white image dropout right behind the centre of card contacts, which is typically about 8-10mm (~3/8") in diameter.

I am investigating the possibilities of getting hold of some better quality cards, but they will inevitably be more expensive and it will still not be possible to get a consistently good print on this area of the card.

The only complete solution for full artwork cards is to buy a 'retransfer' type of card printer, but at a base model price of $5000+, and consumables costing three times that of my current printer, I wouldn't consider this to be economically viable unless the selling price of the cards was to increase significantly (at the current smartcard price I would need to sell the best part of 10,000 cards just to break even with this printer).

The best solution I can come up with at the moment, is to redesign the artwork so that the image has a white background in these areas. I'll be updating my own artwork in the next few days. For those of you that would like to design their own artwork I have produced a guide template image to refer to that shows the safe areas, and the areas that are prone to image dropouts.

Anyone requesting artwork that is likely to suffer from these image dropouts, will be contacted by email to confirm that they will accept this, before the cards are printed and dispatched, so there may be some delays in sending out cards in the next few weeks. Hopefully I will have some alternative artwork to offer as replacements very soon.

[StuTalon]

Not sure if this will work...probably not, but have you tried cutting a piece of thick cardstock or thin cardboard and notching a hole where the chip would be then running that thru the printer with the card piggybacked on top of it so you have an even surface again? Perhaps secure the two with some painters tape or light bond double sided tape?

[luckydog]

I worked in printing for 18 years.

Great Idea!!

the first place I worked did a lot of custom work, hot stamping and silk screening by hand.

we had to make a lot of custom jigs to print some uneven items.

it always was a challenge to do a good job fast

[daverob]

Thanks for the idea Stu. Although it's the other way round, there is a small hollow section in the card surface behind the chip, so I'd need something on the piggyback card to push it back out with.

I'll try some experiments and see if it helps, but I would still expect there to be some artwork distortion and image dropouts in this area even if I manage to improve the situation.

[Tulsa]

Why not just print to a self-adhesive overlay and stick it on the card itself? That way if you ever decided to change the artwork on your card, you just peel the old one off and place the new one on it.