ID Card Printer Review of Magicard Helix Printer

Video Transcription:

Hi guys, it’s Matt with Easy Badges with another ID card printer review. Today we are going to review the Magicard Helix ID card printer.

I’m really excited for the Magicard Helix card printer review because the Helix is truly unique and I believe its obvious that its the future of card printing. What makes it truly unique is the LCD screen. While lots of card printers have LCD screens, but they are limited on what information they give you and how they show it.

We’ll start at top here. You can see exactly how you are connected to the printer. Right now in this case, the USB cable is lit up. It tells you the temperature. If you are at the right temperature in order to start printing. It tells you the yield that is left on the ribbons and what type of ribbon you have. So in this case I have a YMCKS ribbon loaded, its has 98 percent left. Now down here is what you’ll really like and will save your company a lot of time. You can print sample cards very easily. Choose from 4 different options. You can see your system information, some, change some basic settings right from the LCD screen of the printer as well. And here is the screen that will show you exactly how to do everything. Including loading new ribbons and film into the Helix printer. So its very useful in case there’s multiple people using the printer and they’re not familiar with it. It really saves a lot of time. Also how to reorder consumables. This is great if you are reselling it or just helping your employees quickly find support and reorder information. You can also change your watermark designs. You can cycle through the available different designs and we will talk more about Holokote later on. And the last option on the LCD screen shows you how to clean your printer. There are two options, how to clean the print head and how to clean the main printer. If the printer is too warm, it will actually give you a warning so it will prevent damage from you cleaning it while its still warm.

Another unique feature of the Magicard Helix is the ribbon capacities. Both the ribbon and the retransfer film are good for 1,000 cards. So that’s twice as much the popular Fargo HDP5000 printer on the ribbon and a little less on the retransfer film, but its also nice that they match. So with those high capacity yields, it really speeds up the printing process. Even though the printer might not be faster, that time it takes to load ribbons and swap out the jobs and stop print commands, this can really save some time. They load pretty uniquely as well. You can see these split apart and they are color coded so you don’t mess them up. You see the blue indicator here matches with the blue so you know the retransfer film goes over there and the ribbon goes over here. You can see that the ribbons easily slide into their cartridges.

The Helix has a high capacity input and output hopper of both 200 PVC cards.

Holokote is a great alternative to holographic laminates. Holographic laminates on traditional laminators can be very expensive and usually there is a 50 roll minimum as well as an origination fee. But Holokote prints a watermark into your existing overlay panel or in this case, retransfer film so there is no additional cost per card. The Helix comes is with 10 generic Holokote designs and you can also have a custom produced for a small fee.

The Helix is a retransfer printer which means the image is printed onto a retransfer film and then laid down onto the PVC card. The other common printing technology that is used by card printers is called direct-to-card. The first benefit being that is can go truly edge-to-edge and actually wrap around the edges of the card. While the direct-to-card printer is going to leave a small edge around the entire card. The other advantage of a retransfer printer is you can get much more vibrant colors and you get less ribbon tears by the ribbon sticking onto the card.

The Helix has a 3 year UltraCover Plus warranty which means if anything happens within 3 years of purchase and it needs to come in for repair, we overnight a loaner at no charge. Compared to the popular Fargo HDP5000, that’s 2 extra years of hot-swap warranty.

Thanks for watching guys. I hope you enjoyed the review of the Magicard Helix. And I hope you join me again for another ID card printer review.