Credit Card Roll Information.

Credit Card machines have been available for the last 50 years and since Barclays were the first UK bank to issue credit cards under Barclaycard in 1966, the UK retail industry has offered customers a payment alternative to cash or cheque. In the last 40 years the Credit Card technology has evolved from large clunky manual machines that took an imprint of the card number to the Chip and Pin machines available now.

Chip and Pin machines are a recent innovation that allows retailers to accept credit card payments from customers in person without the customer needing to sign for their goods. Constant security worries in the retail industry have brought about Chip and Pin protects consumers from credit card fraud by asking them to type a pin number into the Chip and Pin terminal.

Credit Card machines come in all shapes and sizes. A lot of retailers are still waiting to go all the way over to the Chip and Pin idea of taking credit card payments and instead of a machine that does everything in one some retailers use a Chip and Pin terminal to validate the card but print the Credit Card receipt using a separate machine.

Credit Card rolls are also known as PDQ rolls or Chip and Pin rolls. Credit Card rolls are available as thermal rolls (all Chip and Pin rolls use thermal paper) or paper rolls. Thermal Credit Card rolls are available in many sizes but are all 1 ply.

Paper Credit Card rolls are available in many sizes but are also available in 1 or 2 ply options. A Credit Card machine that takes 2 ply rolls is able to print one receipt for the customer and keep a carbon copy for them at the same time where a 1 ply roll requires the machine to print the receipt twice.

Plain Paper Credit Card machines require an ink ribbon to be refilled on a regular basis whereas Thermal Credit Card machines use a thermal process to print onto the paper without needing ink.