In our continuing quest for digital press technology, I ventured to Paris this week to attend the Cartes show. It’s the largest tradeshow devoted to card manufacturing – printing, encoding, tracking, packing – with showspace approximately 3 times larger than GraphExpo. I’m here through Thursday, but already I’m excited about the possibilities that this show has for us, and for digital printers overall.
The market is not in credit card print production. That market seems to be dominated by four companies now. It also has razor thin margins. The real money seems to be in producing cards for the gift card, loyalty and identification card markets. Gift cards are a $30 billion dollar industry, annually, and it doesn’t seem to be letting up.
There were very few digital press companies at the show. No Kodak, HP or Xerox presence. KBA was showing their press, a 52UV that looked impressive, but it only prints static sheets, not variable. More interesting, and the reason that I came in particularly, was to see the new JetCard press from MGI. This is the company that has the toner-based press we use, the Meteor DP60, which let’s you print to plastic as easily as paper, and steps outside the 13×19 box most other toner-based presses sit in.
MGI’s development of the JetCard seems to be a very well thought out design. It is an inkjet-based press, printing up to 6 colors in a single pass, including CMYK, spot UV or flood coat, and blacklight security ink. It can also have the option of a Pantone spot color with the 6th head.
The significance of this machine is that it replaces five pieces of equipment and four personnel, bringing plastic card print production into a very focused production cost in a tenth of the space needed today. The entire machine occupies perhaps 75 square feet, at 25 feet long and maybe 3 feet deep. All the functions of producing a plastic card inline.
Blanks enter the machine, get pre-coated prior to printing, and then pass through the print engine. The reason for the print coating is that you can then use any plastic you want, rather than pre-treated, which holds a significant savings in the production model. During the printing phase, a small optical camera checks the print using a tiny 2D barcode printed on the card. At the output side of the press, cards are quality control checked with bad ones ejecting out the side; and neatly stacked face down, ready to be printed on the backside if needed.
Cards can be magstripe, RFID, or just have a security coat printed on them. The output is nothing less than spectacular, with an apparent resolution of about 175 line screen quality. Type at 3pt in size is clearly legible, although I needed a loupe to read it.
Print speed is 8000 cards an hour, single sided, complete. That means printed, coated, encoded, and since they are already cut, there is no post-print finishing needed. Cost is in the mid-six figures (Euro) depending on configuration. A Fiery RIP is used for the front end, which means it is ready to print variable data on the fly.
Cost per card looks to be about 1.6 cents each, ink costs only. As with all MGI products, there is no click charge associated with the printing. Considering that the current cost to print plastic cards (and not all in one process) is around 12 cents each, it holds a remarkable profit margin. Of course, you still need to figure in labor and overhead costs, and apply an amortization cost to it as well, but those costs still keep this as a high-profit margin area of the print business.
Although the press was not initially designed for this, it does print on coated card stock as well. Again, quality was very high, and as an all-in-one digital card printer, it is the first of it’s kind in the world. MGI says now that they have conquered printing to plastic with a digital inkjet press, a bigger size digital inkjet press may very well be in their plans for DRUPA 2012. At this point, it is only speculation, but with MGI holding patents for the only digital spot UV coater (also using inkjet technology) and now the JetCard, it is more likely than not that MGI will continue to grow in the digital print market.
I’m bringing back from the show a limited number of samples; if you’re interested in seeing them, drop me a line and I’ll ship some out to you.
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