Page 17 - Security Today, January/February 2019

Cloud-based issuance services also increase reliability through en- hanced awareness of printer health and maintenance needs and all ac- tivity down to the printer level, including the consumables status. As an example, a service provider can predict when a printer will run out of a consumable and drop-ship replacements to the customer in advance.
Another advantage of the cloud model is that it future-proofs the card office, ensuring operations will be compatible with today’s and tomorrow’s credential technology including mobile IDs that en- able users to carry ID cards on their smartphones. In the meantime, though, physical cards aren’t going away any time soon and today’s printers are rising to the challenge of faster throughput with im- proved reliability and energy efficiency.
Breaking Speed and Efficiency Barriers
Achieving higher throughput has required new ways of looking at traditional solutions, especially in the retransfer printer category. In the past, film printing and card retransfer processes for these units were separate, and it could take as long as three to four minutes be- fore the first card was printed. This also affected overall throughput, restricting it to as little as 100 cards per hour. This all changed when printers were re-engineered to enable simultaneous film printing and card retransfer processes. Backed by a multi-tasking architecture with larger memory than in the past, this approach enabled significantly faster throughput speeds.
As an example, HID Global has reduced the time it takes to print the first card to 60 seconds, or less than half that of printers using the traditional approach. This cuts as much as 20 hours in average an- nual wait times for printed and laminated cards while enabling record overall throughput of up to 230 cards per hour. Another important
aspect of the latest architectures is that they eliminate the need for continuous transfer roller heating, which improves reliability while cutting energy usage to low GreenCircle certification levels. This can save users thousands of dollars in annual energy costs for large proj- ects that use many printers.
Further savings are possible with today’s wasteless lamination so- lutions. With wasteless lamination, the lamination patches that are applied to cards for increased durability are attached to one another in a continuous stream of material on a single roll. Through technol- ogy that ensures precise placement, the need for an underlying carrier film is eliminated. Once the supply roll has been depleted, all that remains is a single empty core.
There also have also been advances in image quality and color fidelity. Look for printers that offer true 600 dot-per-inch (DPI) reso- lution and precision color panel registration for sharper text, crisper barcode edges and more vibrant colors than are possible with other products that use dithering techniques that can only approximate this image quality.
Today’s secure issuance technology continues to advance, giving users many more options across the entire process from design and encoding to printing. Cloud-based platforms bring these elements into a centralized and integrated system, and the
latest printers deliver additional benefits with
significantly faster throughput and other innova-
tions that increase reliability and both cost and
energy savings.
Robin Tandon is the director of product marketing, Cloud Solutions at HID Global.
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