Advice on printing plastic cards on a Zebra P430i

[SusanUK]

Hi, new member here. I'm sorry if i'm posting in the wrong place.

Does anyone here know about the Zebra P430i and plastic cards in general ?
I have a very small business mostly craft items, posters, flyers and very short printing runs for friends businesses.

Anyway I recently bought a new Zebra P430i with the intention of printing membership cards and gift cards for a couple of local businesses, but i'm having a lot of problems, these machines are very different from paper printing. Zebra themselves are not very helpful and the manual was very sparse.

I am using standard graphics programmes such as Irfanview and Imageforge to make up the designs, but the result on the card isn't as good as I thought it would be, and sometimes a little overlap with colours.
Also the black is quite grey and fuzzy, I attempted to print a barcode but the result wasn't dark or sharp enough, even after adjusting contrast and brightness.

My questions are,

Is there an ideal graphics programme to use with this ? (I can't afford actual card software)

Is there a way to get part of the image (such as barcodes) to print using only the black part of the ribbon ?

How do I use the double sided feature of this machine ?

Any other tips would be welcome too
Many thanks.

 

[cardjett]

I would say, first off, that buying the I series printer was your first mistake. These printers are highly unreliable. I would have just bought the P310 series printers. They have fewer options but are much more reliable.
The ideal graphics programmes to use is simply photoshop and illustrator. You need both programs depending on the type of graphics you need rendered.
Typically the setting to use only the black part of the ribbon is located in the print driver you can find in the control panel under printers and faxes and then the P430i then properties. You are seldom given access to these settings within the software.
The double side feature of the I series printers is always the very first thing to go down. They are very volatile. I would recommend.
I work for a company that designs and prints plastic cards for small businesses, hotel chains, and major corporations wanting gift cards.

 

[cardsmart]

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