Zebra Announces UHF RFID Card Printers

EPCsolutions' CEO, Kevin Kail, says his firm is also incorporating the Zebra card printers in asset-tracking and work-in-process (WIP) applications it offers its customers. A few of those customers, he notes, are embarking on pilot deployments of such applications. An important benefit of using the UHF passive cards to track totes or other items in an asset-tracking or WIP application, Kail indicates, is that an end user can interrogate both the tote tag and EPC Gen 2 passive tags applied to products or parts inside the tote using a single reader infrastructure. When employing an active tag to track a tote, a separate interrogator would be required to read that tag.

Zebra does not produce RFID card printers for LF or HF tags, Bulzoni says, because there is already a large amount of competition in that arena. There is no such competition in the UHF card printer arena, however, and he says Zebra believes it has a large, ready market for the printers in the access-control and asset-tracking applications. What's more, Bulzoni adds, retailers could use the printers to create RFID customer loyalty cards.

The R4i RFID card printer, also from Zebra, can print on both sides of RFID-enabled stock.

In tests, notes Bulzoni, passive UHF RFID cards encoded by the two printers offer a read range averaging 10 to 12 feet. If customers were to use the cards to identify assets with metal or liquid contents, however, the read range would most likely be less. To boost the read range in such scenarios, they would need to apply a buffering material or find another manner of offsetting the tags from the RF-interfering objects, such as by hanging the tag off the asset on a lanyard. The cards do not come with predrilled mounting or lanyard holes, so end users would need to make such modifications themselves, but they can order adhesive-backed cards.

The R3i model can print, encode and verify up to 144 cards per hour, while the R4i can print, encode and verify up to 130 single-sided cards or 102 double-sided cards per hour. The lower capacity for one-sided cards on the R4i, relative to the R3i, is due to the longer card feed in the R4i, Bulzoni explains. Both printers reject cards with faulty inlays and print in full color, at a resolution of 300 dots per inch.

The R3i and R4i are available now in North America, with prices beginning at $4,390 and $5,390, respectively, for models with USB connectivity. Versions containing Ethernet ports cost extra. Both machines can print on cards compliant with ISO standards CR-80-ISO 7810, ISO 7811 (which include a magnetic stripe on the card that the machines can also encode) and ISO 7816-2. According to Bulzoni, Zebra contracts with a third party to manufacture RFID plastic (polyvinyl chloride) cards made with an inlay developed by Zebra, using a dual-dipole antenna design and the latest Impinj Monza EPC Gen 2 chip. Bulzoni says end users can expect to pay $4 to $5 per standard Gen 2 UHF card.