NACCU New Corporate Highlight: DASCOM
NACCU New Member Highlight:
DASCOM
In this latest installment of our New Member Highlight, we catch up with Judy Lazor with new NACCU member DASCOM.
Give us a brief history of your company.
DASCOM has been developing printing technology for more than 35 years. Founded in 1988, the company has grown into a global technology organization serving customers in more than 100 countries, with a long history of engineering printing solutions for demanding business, government, and institutional environments.
DASCOM Americas, headquartered in central Virginia, serves the North and Latin American markets. While DASCOM may be a newer name to some campus card professionals, we are certainly not new to printing. Our experience in print engineering, manufacturing and technology development is now being applied to a growing portfolio of card printing and credentialing solutions.
What does your company do?
DASCOM develops and manufactures printing technologies for organizations where reliability, performance, and ease of operation are critical.
Within card printing, we offer direct-to-card and retransfer printers designed for applications ranging from everyday identification and access credentials to high-volume, high-quality and secure card issuance. Our goal is not simply to offer another card printer, but to give organizations a better alternative when they are evaluating their next generation of card issuance technology.
For colleges and universities, that means solutions designed around the realities campus card offices face every day: maintaining uptime during peak issuance periods, producing consistent high-quality credentials, simplifying operation, and controlling the long-term cost of card production.
DASCOM also designs and manufactures direct thermal mobile printers, desktop label printers, and dot matrix printers.
What products and services do you provide specifically to campus card operations?
DASCOM Americas offers several card printing solutions that fit different campus issuance requirements.
For universities requiring premium image quality, higher-volume production and more advanced credential capabilities, the DC-8600 Pro is our flagship 600 dpi retransfer solution. It provides over-the-edge printing, high-capacity card handling, optional contact, contactless, and mag stripe encoding, and support for DASCOM's unique PatchIM™ technology.
For traditional laminating, DASCOM offers the DC-5300 laminator, which can be connected to the DC-8600 Pro or used in manual feed standalone mode.
Our DC-4100 is a compact direct-to-card printer designed for speed, simplicity and everyday credential issuance. It produces up to 200 full-color cards per hour and features 100-card input and output capacities, a large 4.3-inch display, flexible connectivity, and encoder-ready capabilities.
The DC-2300 provides a flexible, modular direct-to-card platform with a compact footprint, multiple resolution options, encoder support, and optional dual-sided printing.
Together, these products allow a university to select the appropriate printer for everything from decentralized or departmental issuance to the demands of a central campus card office.
Is there a new product or service you want to tell us about?
Absolutely! One technology we believe will be particularly interesting to the campus card community is PatchIM™, available with the DASCOM DC-8600 Pro.
PatchIM™ enables the DC-8600 Pro to print and laminate a credential without requiring a laminator. For a campus card operation, that means less equipment to purchase and maintain, fewer consumables, and a simpler card production process, while still providing the durability and security benefits of a protected credential.
PatchIM™ cards have an expected life of approximately five to seven years compared with one to two years for traditionally printed cards without lamination. An optional holographic PatchIM can provide an additional visual security element.
We're especially excited about the combination of PatchIM™ with the DC-8600 Pro's 600 dpi retransfer printing. Universities don't necessarily need another printer that simply does what their existing printer does. As equipment reaches replacement age, we want campus card professionals to know there are new technologies available that can improve print quality, simplify production and potentially reduce the long-term cost of credential issuance.
We also recently introduced the DC-4100, expanding our direct-to-card portfolio with a compact, easy-to-use solution capable of producing up to 200 full-color cards per hour.
What are you hoping to gain from your NACCU membership?
First and foremost, we want to listen and learn.
We want to get to know NACCU members and present DASCOM as a valuable resource and another option when the time comes to replace and upgrade their existing card printing equipment.
Campus card professionals operate in a very specialized environment, and NACCU gives us an opportunity to better understand the challenges universities are facing today — from peak-volume card issuance and printer uptime, to credential durability, security, evolving card technologies, and the overall cost of maintaining an issuance program.
We're not joining NACCU simply to introduce a product. We want to build long-term relationships with campus card professionals, technology partners and solution providers, learn from the community, and use that feedback to continue developing solutions that address the real-world needs of higher education.
Ultimately, we hope DASCOM becomes a name campus card professionals consider when they ask, “What should we look at next?”
Learn more about DASCOM on our website at https://www.dascom.com/.