Gemalto won a new Sesames award at the 2012 CARTES & IDentification industry conference for its PrintPixel security feature.

“This Sesames award endorses our capacity in developing innovative products that lead to real-life applications and tangible benefits for service providers and end users, as part of our ongoing commitment to serving our customers with pioneering solutions that make them stay one step ahead,” said Tan Teck-Lee, Gemalto’s chief innovation and technology officer. “The security features that are visible with the bare eye are always very efficient, easy to check by officials at border control and providing increased protection for citizens.”

PrintPixel is a highly secure printing technology that allows color photographs to be permanently embedded into polycarbonate identity cards. The remarkable innovation combines the security of laser engraving, which enables markings deep into the card body, with the quality of color portraits.

Conventional surface printing techniques for applying color portraits to polycarbonate cards are vulnerable to counterfeit as well as simple wear and tear. PrintPixel overcomes these limitations by retaining the deep marking characteristics of grey-scale laser engraving, but improving these with color capabilities. PrintPixel is performed independently of the card production process to provide a greater degree of flexibility for personalization of documents.