Plastic Card Printers - Custom Printed Lanyards
ID Card Software - Identification Cards

Biometric identification to be used on Digital ID cards would include fingerprints and iris scans. These measures it is believed would help prevent fraud in using the cards.

However Tsutomu Matsumoto, a Japanese mathematician and cryptographer who works with security decided to see if he could fool the machinery which identifies you by your fingerprint. Equipment need for this experiment cost around £20.

You make a cast of the desired finger using moulding plastic and pour liquid gelatin into the mould and let it set. You then stick the gelatin sheet over your fingertip and it has been show to fool Digital ID card readers 80% of the time. As the fake fingertip is made of gelatin, it could be eaten and the evidence destroyed.

There is also the awful possibility that fingers of individuals may be amputated in order to use them fraudulently in readers.

People often leave their fingerprints on surfaces and glass is particularly good for retrieval. Cyanoacrylate glue or Superglue can be used to pick up prints off glass. These in turn can be photographed, edited and etched to make a mould.

Alternatively, the fingerprint data stored on Digital ID cards would be stored as a series of numbers but it has been shown that these can be read by an external device not actually needing to touch you and scientists have managed to actually reconstruct a fingerprint from the data alone and as part of the experiment, used it to fool a fingerprint reader. So biometrics on digital ID cards might not be so secure after all!

Most independent designers will create two or more sample designs when creating a logo for you, whereas if you ask a larger design company they will typically create four or more design options, even if it is not necessary. Usually they are slight variations of one another based on your requirements rather than a set of completely different designs.

With the right amount of research performed by the designer as well as a good design brief and dialogue with the client the designer will find the solution that is right for the client’s business. There is usually only one solution that is found that the client is happy with.

When the designer is happy with their options they will present the outputs of the design process to the client normally in pdf format, accompanied by good reasons why the design works for the client’s business marketing strategy. If the client agrees with the design then typically there is a refinement period where certain areas of the design are improved with the client’s feedback taken into account.

 

In this years Drupa event the Irish 3D software specialist DPLenticular, previously known as LPC Europe, will present a wide range of 3D printing products, including in large format. They will be showcasing their Lenstar products, in particular the 40LPI printer product range, that also offers productions in posters in volumed quantities.  They will be demonstrating its abilities in much larger sizes with the 3D and flip effect.

The Lenstar sheets allow the printers to interlace the image they are printing directly on to the glossy surface, and they are manufactured consistently to preset tolerances.

However, DPLenticular isn’t just targeting the larger formats in the marketplace – they say there’s a real possibility of using the lenticular products for packaging, point-of-purchase design, direct mail and on card formats and promotional.
 

Daniel Pierret, founder and managing director of DPLenticular, said: “We are very excited at the prospect of Drupa 2008.

“With more than 10 years’ experience in Europe, DPLenticular is well positioned to gain new market share in the promotional and advertising sector as the need for brand owners to promote their products with innovative solutions, such as 3D and animation pictures, continues to grow.”

 

Océ has created a “fundamentally new printing technology” said a spokesperson for the company. It combines elements of toner and inkjet printing to produce documents for large-format applications of mono and colour waterfast.

At a worldwide launch party held at the company’s headquarters in Venlo on Wednesday, the first machine to use the new technology was showcased by the manufacturer, the Océ ColorWave 600.

Neil Westhof, international product manager for Océ wide-format printing systems, said recent trends in wide-format colour have represented a “blurring of applications”.He added this had led to an increasing need for a machine which can print “both fine details and sharp lines, as well as posters as separate prints, but also within a single print”.

 

The new CrystalPoint process is achieved by having small balls of toner converted into a gel. Océ calls these balls TonerPearls. The TonerPearls are then crystalised and jetted on to the paper (which can be recycled or untreated stock paper) to produce semi-gloss quality, waterfast images.

Chief executive of Océ N.V Rokus van Iperen said: “The ColorWave 600 is going to change the way our customers print wide-format colour documents.”

 

The Buckingham based commercial printer Pelican Print has bought into the large-format marketplace after investing in a six-colour Roland SolJet Pro III XC-540. The printing company now employs 36 members of staff who together create a range of large format prints including popups, banners and outdoor signage for shops and other commercial projects.

Scott Brookes, joint managing director of Pelican Print, hopes the machine “will open up new markets” to the printer.

“We can now go a large-format client and offer our litho and digital services and vice versa. It helps us offer a more integrated service” he said.

A new employee starts at the company to look after the new Roland Press, which forms part of a battery of presses that includes the two Komori B2 presses and HP Indigo.

Brookes added: “Our customers appreciate our high standards, quality control and attention to detail, something we can now offer for large-format exhibition products.”

 

 

 

For a long time now the debate over which is better - Digital Printing or Litho Printing. It has not been a raging debate but it has been bubbling for those involved. Some people say it isn’t a case of which of the two printing processes is the better but which is most fitting for the job. I personally agree with that.

However the main criteria that is agreed on is that it depends on the length of the prints as to which process is best to use, as this can have gains on the cost effectiveness of each technology. Unfortunately the actual threshold where the cost effectiveness of a process changes is where the confusion and opinions conflict. The press manufacturers say that the threshold is in the low hundreds whereas the digital vendors say it is well into the thousands. Hardly surprising.

More confusing is the fact that the vendors each month will bring out a new model of digital machines and litho press machines that promise to out-do one another.

The print quality question is even harder to argue, but for many it is either one or the other - it is not a case of which is best for a certain job - people are either of the opinion that digital is better or not at all. Every cloud.

 

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Supermarkets and large retail outlets spend millions of pound on their loyalty card schemes each year.
Tesco was believed to have given out £200m of vouchers last year and other retailers offer different enticements and that’s before all the mail shots sent to 15 million card holding customers. They do this to increase sales by using the information you supply on application combined with details of all products you take through the checkout.

This gives the retailer a detailed picture of your lifestyle. You could be classified according to family circumstances, wealth, what foods you purchase, price sensitivity etc.

If you’re seen to be a bargain-hunter, you could  receive alerts to offers on products that you don’t generally buy .Or conversely, if you always buy the same brands without price checking, you may not get these offers at all – especially if you buy the sellers own makes.

Different marketing messages are sent to young families and professional couples. The highest-spenders will probably get special offers and freebies that the rest of us don’t. Loyalty cards just want us to spend more.

The biggest loyalty card schemes hold large amounts of information about us. Although the care and storage of this information is strictly regulated, if you haven’t ticked the ‘do not share my information’ box on the form, your details could be shared amongst different agencies. (That explains junk mail you’ve received around the time of your insurance renewals).

Also some schemes like Nectar share their information allowing a fuller picture of their shoppers to be built. This enables retailers to not only know your food shopping habits but also insight into the car you own, your musical tastes, your earnings etc. The aim is to increase sales in that particular shop network, leaving independents in the cold.

SMART card technology is both secure and cheap enough for all sized businesses to use them. The advantages they offer to businesses dealing with small financial transactions are apparent and the expense to convert to this new way of working offers its long term rewards.

For example a small vending machine business with under a hundred vending machines that they administer might choose to use SMART cards at their point of sale machines rather than ordinary cash.

For the consumer of the vending machines this is advantageous as it is quick to buy things at a point of sale as they will not be fumbling around for loose and exact change (if the machine runs out of small change for refunds for example as they often do). It also means that only people (usually employees) working in the business where the vending machine is located can buy from the vending machine, rather than every passer-by buying from it. Which prevents the vending machine from running out, as can happen on busy days.

From the vendors point of view if they have several machines in a business they only have to worry about refilling the vending machines with food and not with spare change, and they don’t have to empty the machines each day of their cash. Which saves time, banking fees, and security fees. They can sell the credit for the SMART cards through a secure website, allowing customers to top up their SMART cards online with a credit card.

 

If you have been disappointed with the results of your print jobs from your printer company, do you ever wonder why it keeps happening to you?

There are three possibilities why this keeps happening to you, either you are assuming your printer understands what you are saying, you are not explaining yourself well enough or your printer is getting it wrong.

There is a need to make sure you are asking the right questions when ordering prints from a printers. YOU know exactly what YOU want at the time of ordering the items, but YOU must make sure your printer knows exactly what YOU want. Ask them questions about what the result will be like, asking them open questions as opposed to closing questions to get the dialogue flowing, which allows for misunderstanding to air themselves.

It’s an old cliché but try not to assume that just because you have spent 3 months working out exactly what you want and you know what you want, that everyone else automatically knows what you want because of this.

 

This is probably the simplest use of Digital IDentity cards and can be completed without use of a card reader to check your details against the NIR (National Identity Register).

Here are two examples:

A young looking 18 year old wishes to buy alcohol from an off-licence for a Birthday party and a sprightly elderly person wants to prove they are a pensioner in order to gain discount at a DIY store. In both cases, proof of age would be asked for and with ID cards, both parties wouldn’t have to bother carrying around the following:

•    birth certificate
•    pension book/bus pass
•    driving licence
•    Passport etc.

The digital ID card could be produced and the retailer could look at the photograph and compare the customer - after having checked the ID card for security features first.

When the retailers are satisfied that the ID cards are genuine and truly belong to the customer, they can get the relevant DOB information and the transactions continue.

It would only take a matter of minutes and the ID card is a small portable easy to use device to ensure a person is who and the age they claim to be.