The Development and Application of Magnetic Ink

Around the 1960s, with the development of electronic technology, magnetic inks were first used in banking and postal services. The use of magnetic ink was not used for anti-counterfeiting. It was mainly used for automatic processing of bank bills and automatic sorting of postal letters. Therefore, magnetic inks were only used to print letters and numbers to enable automatic identification and processing of printed parts. , that is, magnetic ink character recognition (micr). Since the 1980s, magnetic inks are no longer limited to black or limited color ranges, but have been extended to four-color magnetic inks.

At present, the annual consumption of magnetic oil black in the world has reached as many as several thousand tons. It is mainly used for the printing of symbols and letters on cheques. The printing method is generally used for plain printing and embossing; there is also printing on credit cards. Tapes.

Another category that is basically similar to the micr technique is the optical character recognition (ocr). This technique was invented around 1952. The device is simply called a reader. Also known as an optical scanner, it is a device that uses optical principles to recognize alphabetic characters. Its output system can generate magnetism or be directly input into a computer for data processing.

The ink used on this device is called ocr ink (also called optical ink). There are generally two types: non-readable and readable, the latter mainly referring to black inks, and the former to various colored inks. The ocr ink can be designed according to the general type of ink, such as plain printing, embossing, gravure printing and silk printing. The content of pigments in non-readable inks is generally between 1% and 5%, and some can be used around 20%. At present, micr is quickly replaced by ocr in terms of file classification, because ocr information is entered into the computer faster. The micr is mainly used in printing anti-counterfeiting and information recording.

Substrate substrates used for magnetic printing include two major classes of polymer materials and paper. Polymer materials are mainly made of polyester, hard pvc, nylon, etc., while the paper is selected more fine paper, after printing, coating or film processing, so that both good printing adaptability, but also improve the paper resistance Grinding and other mechanical properties.