My first experience with a debit card was the unembossed Halifax Visa Electron card which I got in my teens (and I still have that account somewhere). I saw that at the cheaper card I had to get through to get an embossed fully featured Visa Debit when I turned 18.
In the end I see printed cards as cheaper to make so presume are lesser quality. I see ‘effort’ made with the embossing of embossed cards which strangely increase their value to me.
This has no reasoning except as @anon44204028 and @patrice58 say, past associations of these types of cards.
Would you prefer an embossed plastic card over a metal core card? Genuine question, I’m not sure… I don’t like the weight of the metal core cards, after the novelty is over it’s just more weight to carry around!
Not necessarily, because they can still de-laminate and weird things can happen. That said, I once peeled the plastic off of a Chase Sapphire Preferred card and the card number and personal details appeared as burn marks in the underlying metal! (It’s laser engraved, like all metal core cards I’ve ever seen are).
Here’s a photo of a card design I really like from the US. Note, the name is laser engraved and this is a plastic card. The rest of the relevant details are laser engraved on the back. To me, there’s nothing cheap looking about this at all and it is unembossed plastic. Thoughts on something like this (but in hot coral and with contactless of course)?
For a little bit of context to a few things mentioned above, I expect that unembossed cards will become normal in a few years but as of right now, we found that alternative methods of printing the card number came off or otherwise looked significantly worse after a few simulated months of use than what we went with. The design team wanted to prioritise long term readability of the numbers here.
Interesting to hear that perspective, Richard, thanks! It’s funny it goes exactly against my real-world experience. The numbers start wearing off of my embossed cards almost immediately, while my unembossed cards last the life of the card.
Look at that Bank of America card above… The data is literally burnt into the plastic, I’m not really sure how it could wear off? Discover and Capital One (USA) both print, but with a plastic overlay that protects it, in my experience, far better than embossed numbers.
Thus, I’m wondering what’s happening differently in testing from what happens inside my wallet. Am I doing something wrong that embossed cards start to lose their numbers within days? I thought that was just pretty normal for them.
LOL clearly a topic that divides opinion. The reason I asked that specifically is it seems there’s a lot of desire for metal core cards and you can’t* have it both ways. Metal core, or embossing Solid metal can be embossed, of course, but not many** people would want to give up contactless.
*that I have seen - and I can’t think of a way to do it technically, either.
**in the UK - in the US contactless is rare and in Japan it is basically unheard of.
It’s worth noting that our manufacturers perhaps have different capabilities to those in the US.
The embossed cards had a more graceful degradation than printed cards. Yes, the ink will start to come off of the embossed cards but they fundamentally remained readable through all of our testing.
clearly a topic that divides opinion. The reason I asked that specifically is it seems there’s a lot of desire for metal core cards and you can’t* have it both ways. Metal core, or embossing