ID card printers come in a wide variety of styles, with features ranging from single or dual-sided printing up to lamination, encoding, and more. With so many options it may be hard to pick a printer, but the printer experts at ID Card Group are here to help you choose – and one of the easiest ways to start is by looking at low, standard, or high volume ID card printers.
Low Volume ID Card Printers
Low volume ID card printers are designed to handle a very small amount of cards – they will either have hand-feed printing only, where you need to manually feed each card into the printer, or extremely small card hoppers. These printers are ideal for small organizations who want to print ID cards but cannot meet the 100 card minimum of most card printing companies.
One popular low-volume printer is the AlphaCard PRO 100. With the PRO 100 you can product full color cards in 35 seconds (and monochrome in just 7 seconds!). The printer is hand-feed only, so to print dual-sided cards you need to print the first side, then flip the card over and feed it through the printer again – this process is designed for organizations that only have to print a card or two at a time. If you need to print more, consider a standard volume printer.
Standard Volume ID Card Printers
Standard volume ID card printers have hoppers, allowing you to do small to medium batches of cards. This makes the printing process more hands-off, so you can print cards without having to feed each one individually. The size of the hopper will vary by printer model, with some as small as 50 cards and others holding up to 200 cards.
The Datacard SD260 ID card printer has an optional 100 card hopper, so you can print 100 ID cards before you need to reload more cards. This makes the SD260 popular with mid-sized businesses that need to issue employee ID cards, visitor passes, or membership cards for small retail stores or sports teams.
High Volume ID Card Printers
High volume ID card printers are designed to withstand large batch printing, so you can print hundreds of cards without needing to constantly reload new cards. These printers also use higher yield ribbons. With hoppers starting at 200 cards and going all the way up to 500 cards, these printers are used the large organizations, schools and universities, and government offices.
The Zebra ZXP Series 7 ID card printer has a 250 card hopper, and a streamlined one-pass printing method that can produce 225 dual-sided cards per hour. The ZXP Series 7 also has options for dual-sided printing, card encoding, and lamination to fit all your ID card needs.
Questions?
For help choosing the right ID card printer to fit your needs, contact an ID Expert at (877) 868-0012 or [email protected]. We’re happy to walk you through your options and answer questions.
ID Card Group offers a price match guarantee, provides free shipping on orders over $100, and accepts purchase orders.
