How to Monitor Color and Appearance on Payment and Loyalty Cards
Brands use eye-catching colors, logos, metallic foils, and artwork to make gift, ID, hotel key, loyalty, and credit cards stand out and portray value. While important to the brand, these intricate designs can be difficult to control throughout production. Card printers must monitor color to catch issues early and ensure brand consistency across shifts and manufacturing sites.
Challenges
For payment and loyalty card printers, it can be a challenge to replicate brand colors on small logos, photos, and artwork and achieve color consistency across print runs and locations.
- Visual evaluation is subjective and inconsistent.
- Spectrophotometers capture objective color data but can be difficult to align at the exact point of measurement on each card.
- Printed materials cannot be reused so each color error can waste an entire batch of expensive materials if not caught early.
Solution
X-Rite’s Payment Card Holder enables print operators to secure a card and align a handheld spectrophotometer at precise points of measurement to evaluate color accuracy. The ruler features a millimeter scale that enables operators to capture measurements at specified locations for a repeatable process across shifts and manufacturing facilities. Tolerances and pass/fail data can be viewed directly from the handheld spectrophotometer and imported into quality control and assurance software to track trends and identify issues.
Results
- Reduce waste by identifying color issues earlier in the process
- Reduce rework with clear expectations and objective evaluation
- Achieve consistent results across operators and sites with a quantifiable and repeatable process
How it Works
The brand owner specifies an acceptable color tolerance to the printer. To ensure adherence, the print operator pulls a card from the production run and positions it into the X-Rite Payment Card Holder. Using the ruler, the operator aligns the spectrophotometer at the nearest 1mm location to capture exact points of measurement as outlined in the standard operating procedures. The operator can review actionable pass/fail information on the device and determine whether to continue or stop the print run. This measurement data can also be transferred to quality control software to run pass/fail analytics and look for areas of improvement.
Featured Products
Specifically designed to hold gift, ID, hotel key, loyalty, and credit cards, this device allows print operators to take spot measurements on the front and back of a card at specific locations to ensure print quality and consistency. It can fit standard credit cards measuring 3-3/8” (85.6mm) x 2-1/8” (53.98mm) with a nominal thickness of .03” (0.76mm).
ColorCert Quality Assurance Software Suite simplifies color communication across internal and external stakeholders. The Ci62, Ci64, and eXact spectrophotometers connect with ColorCert quality assurance software for simple reporting and quality analysis.
The eXact Family of handheld spectrophotometers is the industry benchmark to validate the color of CMYK and spot color inks on paper, film, and other substrates and leverages the latest industry standards for accurate control of fluorescent inks.
With Color iQC quality control software, you can make pass/fail decisions within tight tolerances through connected solutions. It works with Ci62, Ci64, and eXact spectrophotometers to monitor color from specification through production and look for areas of improvement.
With simultaneous specular-included (SPIN) and specular-excluded (SPEX), Ci60 handheld spectrophotometers can easily identify variances in color and gloss to ensure accurate color readings or verify visual inspection. Available with a variety of aperture sizes, the Ci60 series offers the flexibility to choose the right measurement size for each application.
Achieve Color Success
The X-Rite Payment Card Holder helps card printers capture spot color measurements to ensure eye-catching colors, logos, metallic foils, and artwork are consistent and accurate throughout production, even across shifts and locations. Learn more.
