Zebra ZC300 dual sided card printer bundle - with USB & ETHERNET interfaces incl. Card Studio 2.0, 200 PVC Cards & YMCKO Ribbon (ZC32-000CQ00EM00)

We've just started using this printer and have been able to successfully print our custom designed cards using the software provided by Zebra. The Card Designer software works pretty well with a few quirks we've noticed such as the apparent inability to correctly save the degrees of a gradient for front and back. These are small things, however, and in general the software is working fine. The printer performs decently but has some side effects which are a result of the printing technology used. Our original design used a solid background but we experienced two issues with this. The first was that the printing of the background did not fully cover the card area. This was most noticeable on the back of the card but it was enough for us to decide to shift to a different type of design where we would blend in from the white of the card to our background for the card. This worked better. Another problem we experienced with a solid background was that printing white in the dark grey background caused ghosting of the white text, visible as subtly lighter grey horizontal stripes in the printed background. Finally, we noticed some discrepancies with rendering fonts and printing shades from images compared to design. In our design we had used images which appeared to pop-out by using a drop shadow 'below' the image. When printing, this shade did not come out nicely and looked like a series of small black dots, presumably because the print resolution does not allow for this level of fine dots/transparency levels. We therefore decided to remove these images from the design eventually and go with a design which played more to the strenghts of the ZC300.

All in all, we are quite happy with the printer once you get to know what it does well and where there is room for improvement. The software goes a long way to making your life easier. Both the designer and print studio have helped a lot with designing and printing a large batch of cards so we are really pleased with that.