With digital printing, customizing gift and loyalty cards, security badges and similar items is standard practice. With its IonTouch printer, HP is looking to take that a major step forward, y creating high-resolution displays on cards that can be rewritten to feature new messages.

Keith Moore, HP Fellow and head of the Print Adjacencies & Microfluidics Lab at HP Labs, noted that IonTouch technology emerged out of a request for rewritable paper, in which customers were seeking a more immediate recycling option for items like signage and labels. 

“The engineers who worked on IonTouch had deep knowledge in both printing and displays and saw a way to create low-cost electronic-free rewritable signage,” Moore added.

Moore noted that the IonTouch printer is currently designed for plastic cards like gift cards, loyalty cards, employee badges, etc., but the technology is not limited to this form factor. IonTouch can be used in a number of industries, including hospitality, healthcare, security, retail and transportation.

“Examples include gift cards displaying personalized messages which are refreshable and transferable, security badges that can be reauthorized daily, smarter hotel door keys and medical cards, public transport passes, loyalty cards with discounts or offers personalized for the user, as well as durable, low-cost, rewritable shelf labels of the kind used by pharmacies, grocery stores, and other retailers,” he added.

IonTouch enables non-contact imaging, removing the need for electronics which are necessary on conventional electronic paper displays.

“This allows us to add a high resolution 2.5” display to each card,” Moore continued. “When a card is placed in the IonTouch printer – a device to erase and write onto IonTouch cards – a simple bar code identifies the card, retrieves from the cloud the new information that needs to be placed, and erases the card’s current display before printing the new information.

“The printing is done by a floating, non-contact printhead in much the same way an HP InkJet printhead prints ink onto conventional paper – but without the ink,” he added. “The entire process from card feed, connecting to the cloud database, erasing, printing, and ejecting the newly printed card takes less than four seconds.”

HP’s IonTouch technology offers numerous benefits, beginning its ability to be rewritten. This can lead to immense savings in terms of waste while also improving security.

“This is currently the only technology that enables adding a large display into plastic cards and the only printer that uses no consumables and generates no waste, including the media itself,” Moore said. “The IonTouch cards can be rewritten more than 10,000 times, so this dramatically reduces the millions of cards wasted every year.

“Moreover, since the only way to change information on the IonTouch cards is via IonTouch printers, that adds another layer of security,” added Moore. “Being able to update or rotate security codes boosts the security of credit cards and enables reuse of gift cards, replacing the scratchable or permanent security codes they use today.”

While IonTouch is currently an incubation project, Moore said that testing is expected to begin later this year.

“We are looking at starting pilots in customer sites,” he added.