[davb]

> Printing on the back does present a costly proposition, not only does the printer need a flipper, but you have to use more costly ribbons to do it with.

Not necessarily. I done some badge printing for a very large organisation about 8 years ago. Our office alone had >2,000 people. I bought both single-sided and duplex card printers. The ones with the duplexing units were only marginally more expensive than the single-sided ones. They all used the same dye-sub ribbon (if it has a duplexer - "flipper" - it doesn't need a special ribbon, it prints one side, flips, then prints the other).

Granted, double sided printing meant each card used twice the ribbon. The dye-sub ribbon was laid out in 5 consecutive panels - C, M, Y, K and UV coat (with an optional sixth foil/fluorescent/hologram panel).

Ultimately, we had our card supplier (a very large smartcard/USIM supplier) pre-print our card backgrounds before cutting the cards and personalising (writing the card certificate) so our remote branch offices could use very cheap printers to print only a low-res photo and text content.

Our printers were <£1k each. They had integrated magstripe encoders and smartcard+contactless interfaces.