Background

We have used Magicard badge printers for approximately 5 years now to produce ID badges for staff and students alike. We started off with a couple of the original white RIo printers and upgraded to the Rio 2 model 3 years ago. Since then we have bought 7 of these devices for our various campuses and print out on average 10, 000 cards per year.

As well as standard printing, there are various other clever functions these printers can do such as produce holograms, write to magnetic strips should your cards have them and produce bar codes.

Whats in the box

These things are not small and are also quite heavy. They come extremely well packed with thick polystyrene padding. As well as the printer, you get the mains lead, a parellel cable AND a USB cable, a drivers CD which also contains the user manual in PDF format, a pack of blank badges to print on, one printer ribbon and a cleaning pad.

I would recommend carefully unpacking all of these items as it will be a costly game if you break or lose any of the components.

Installation

This is where the fun starts. These printers are really easy to set up if you want to use it as a standalone printer (ie connected to one PC). A setup wizard will guide you through the software installation and tell you when it is time to connect the printer to either the USB or parallel cable. If this is your preferred method, you should be up and running within 5 minutes of starting the installation routine.

If, however, like us you want to share the printer over multiple PCs on an IP network, you need to buy a print server, and not just any print server at that!!! After numerous telephone conversations with Magicard support, it transpires that the only print server that is compatible with the Magicard printer is the Dlink DPU-300 (also reviewd my me a couple of months ago). Once we purchased this print server, it was simply a case of plugging upto 2 Magicards into it via the parallel port (USB wouldnt work as the Magicards use something called NUSB which is not standard - this is not a problem for one to one connections)

Useage

Once the Magicard is installed you will be able to enjoy the quality of its output immediately. Badges are stored at the rear of the printer in the badge feeder. This tray will hold approximately 100 badges though it is worth keeping an eye on them as they are prone to jamming or slipping when you get down to the final 10 or so. Each badge you print will go through a cycle of printing a series of 5 colours onto the badge plus an overlay film should you request one. This does waste quite a lot of ribbon as it will cycle past a particular colour even if you dont need it. At £50 a ribbon, costs can soon mount up here (a ribbon will produce approximately 350 badges)

Each badge will take around 30 seconds to produce and will eventually drop out of the front of the printer into the holding tray.

Changing the ribbon is quite a simple task. Pressing a button on the side of the printer will spring the top open, giving you access to the inner workings. The print ribbon will be found on 2 spoolers (one end for the unused part of the ribbon and the other end for the used ribbon. Using your index finger and thumb on both hands, lift out the old ribbon and them perform exactly the same process in reverse to load the new film. Once the printer has detected the new film then you are able to recommence the printing.

Maintenance

These printers do not really require much maintenance. Over the 5 years we have had nothing go wrong with them though we do get them serviced every couple of years, simply for peace of mind due to the large volumes of badges we produce.

Verdict

If you need to produce a large quantity of high quality ID badges (could also be other types of document on the plastic media) then I would certainly recommend the Magicard. They certainly are not cheap (around £2,000) but they do produce high quality outputs. Obviously these will only be of use to businesses and not the home user.