Are you responsible for generating large number of ID cards for access control, identification or employees, members, or loyal customers? How do you generate the ID cards, and how much effort does it take? Are you even using any kind of specialized ID software for the task?

In this day and age, the printing industry has made great progress in making it easier and faster to use ID badge software to design and print large numbers of ID cards with little effort. If you are still spending significant human resources, and time on the production of your members’, employees’, and customers’ ID cards, you are doing it all wrong!

Printing ID cards the old fashioned way, using laminators

The old fashioned, slow way of ID Card Making employed a regular black and white or color laser printer to print the card on paper, a camera to create the image, and a piece of glue to attach the photo to the namecard. Then you would simply take a plastic laminator pouch, slide the printed card in, wait for the laminator to heat up, and process, seal, or laminate the card by sending it through the laminator. The only photo ID card software you would use for this purpose would be a Word file template and Microsoft Word or an equivalent graphical word processor.

This process worked well 15, 20 years ago. Back then, it was just about the only game in town for ID card making The old fashioned way using a laminator as an ID maker still works well if you have few ID cards to make at the time. It is also quite flexible as you can laminate any size material to make it more durable while still retaining the information visibility on the material. However, using laminator is anything but fast. And the resulting ID card is not all that pretty.

Modern ID software for plastic ID card making is fast and efficient

Fast forward 20 years. The credit card companies and the banks are not the only ones able to operate ID making software and print plastic ID cards any more. The plastic printer hardware has made much progress, both in reliability, but mostly in prices coming down significantly.

So today, you have a choice. Granted, plastic ID card makers are not cheap still, and modern photo ID software that will make printing plastic ID cards a breeze is not free or even cheap, however, consider this: When using a paper printer and a laminator, you or your staff are basically performing a whole lot of manual labor to get an ID card or multiple ID cards printed.

Manual labor is likely a largest expense in card production as you likely already have a laser printer or a color laser printer that prints on paper. Furthermore, laminators can be purchased cheaply online or in stores. However, it will still take your staff minutes to produce a single laminated ID card, which will cost you money. There’s got to be a better ID card system out there!

On the other hand, consider pulling 100 of names, addresses, phone numbers, and photographs from the database into your photo ID software, turning the ID card printer on, stacking the feeder with blank plastic ID cards, and pressing the PRINT button. Voila! Mission accomplished. It was that easy indeed. And while the plastic ID card printer is chugging along (it still takes quite some time to print), you or your staff is free to do some other job at the same time. In the long run, a modern plastic ID card printer will save your organization money.