Magnetic Stripe Encoding

Magnetic stripes are widely used in the commercial world today. Credit cards, bank cards even corporate membership cards have them encoded nowadays, as a way to store information on the card. These magnetic strips can usually be found at the back of cards in a form of a dark band or stripe.

Magnetic stripes are magnetic particles deposited to form a plastic-like film.Recent technology has allowed two forms of magnetic stripes, high and low coercivity magnetic stripe. High coercitivity stripes offer a higher security feature, and is more guarded against damages from third-party magnetic field. Basically, data from a high coercivity stripe is harder to erase. Low coercivity stripes are more receptive towards magenetic field, thus they are easily damaged by third-party magnetic fields.

Each type of stripes has its pros and cons. High coercivity may be more protected and have a longer usage life, but it comes with a high cost. Vice versa, low coercivity stripes are susceptible to damages, but it is cost effective. As such, a high coercivity stripes are widely used for long term cards, such as credit cards, and low coercivity stripes are used for short term cards, such as park entrance cards.

SMART ID Card Printer understands that each company has special needs to produce special types of cards, depending on its purpose. Thus, it has the option to embed both high corectivity or low corectivity stripes to suit each company’s liking.