New security features on IDGod cards

IDGod updated their production specifications for a subset of states in the past few months, and I want to document what specifically changed based on my most recent order from them and a comparison with a card I received from them about a year ago.

The most visible change is in the holographic overlay zone. On the card I received a year ago, the OVI element showed a relatively narrow color shift range — primarily a gold-to-green shift that was functional but not as wide-ranging as the genuine card for this state. The card from my recent order shows a noticeably wider shift range that includes an orange intermediate color that was absent from the earlier production. Whether this tracks the genuine card for this state more closely, I'd need to compare against a current genuine card to say definitively. But the qualitative change in the OVI range is real.

The UV element also appears to have changed. The earlier card had UV printing that was functional but slightly lower density than what I'd expect from the genuine. The current card has UV fluorescence that is brighter and more even across the element. UV density is one of the harder features to get right, and the improvement here is meaningful.

The barcode encoding is unchanged in structure — both cards decode correctly with the same AAMVA field set — but the encoding quality has improved. The older card sometimes needed a second scan attempt on one of my apps; the current card decoded first-attempt on all three.

IDGod's current production is meaningfully ahead of where they were a year ago on these specific elements. The holographic, UV, and barcode changes I described are consistent across both cards I compared — not a single-card anomaly. Whether it holds across all states I can't say, but for the state I ordered the difference is real enough that it's worth factoring in if you're deciding between IDGod and another vendor.