Smart cards offer enormous advancements in the ID card business. Smart cards can be used for logical access control to networks or databases, physical access control to buildings or rooms or payment systems.

The contact smart cards have a contact area, comprised of several gold-plated contact pads, that is about 1 cm square. They are also called chip cards or IC cards. In fact it is a plastic card with an embedded microchip, which may be used to store information about the cardholder or record card transactions as they occur.

Our ID card printers can be equipped with chip card contacts (electrical connectors) to write information into the chip in single print process. BadgeMaker software can be extended with a DLL that “translates” the encode information for the ID card printer. When inserted into a reader, the chip makes contact with electrical connectors that can read information from the chip and write information back.