A magnetic stripe card is a card embedded with magnetic technology that allows personal information to be read when swept through a card reader. Magnetic stripe cards are used to store data for ID card programs in a wide range of industries including education, healthcare, hospitality, construction, business, retail, and many more.

There are two types of mganetic stripes: High Coercivity, or “HiCo” and Low Coercivity, also known as “LoCo”. Both cards can store the same amount of data. HiCo stripe with 2750OE means that it requires a stronger magnetic field to write data onto the stripe. It’s recommended for most applications such as loyalty cards, membership cards, or gift cards. The LoCo stripe, on the other hand, has a lower coercivity of 300OE. They are cheaper than HiCo so it’s perfect for one-time usage like event passes or hotel key cards where the card isn’t used often.

There are several different widths of magnetic stripes: 12.7mm and 8.4mm are the more common that we offer. We can determine this, simply by measuring the magstripe with a ruler.
1) 12.7mm – This is our most common magstripe size. It contains 3 tracks to be encoded.
2) 8.4mm – This is a 2 track mag stripe, track 1 and 2 only. Track 3 is rarely used, so if you need a larger print area on the card, the 5/16″ magstripe is a good choice.

Normal magnetic stripe contains 3 tracks to be encoded. You can encode 1-3 tracks, although track 3 is very rarely used. This means you can encode more than one track. Typically if 2 tracks are encoded they are encoded with the same information. Below are the specs for each track.
Track 1: 79 characters (alphanumeric) 7 bit = 210 bit /in. – Encoding starts with % (percent sign) and ends with ? (question mark), the common field separator is ^
Track 2: 40 characters (numeric only) 5 bit = 75 bits /in. – Encoding starts with ; (semi-colon) and ends with ? (question mark), the common field separator is =
Track 3: 107 characters (numeric only) 5 bits = 210 bits /in. Encoding starts with + (plus sign) and ends with ? (question mark), the common field separator is =

The standard magnetic stripe is black. We can also make color magnetic stripe, such as gold, silver, red, blue, green, brown etc. You can choose color magnetic stripe to make your cards more special.