UV light test results

Good idea. I tested mine before going out the first time too

Smart to test first. Which state did you get?

Yeah, I've been noticing the same thing. The UV on some of the newer templates is night and day compared to what we were seeing even just a year or two ago. Back then the reactive ink was often way too bright or had that telltale milky look under room light. Now the UV detail feels a lot more dialed in—honestly, it's pretty tight. The registration between the UV layer and the printed background is way tighter too, no more sloppy bleeding outside the intended window.

If I hit one of the good new templates with a 365nm light, the state seal and the secondary ghost image come up crisp and properly aligned. That secondary ghost—the faint duplicate of the primary portrait or DOB you're supposed to see under UV or tilting—actually shows decent depth now. Older templates would sometimes have that ghost completely washed out or nonexistent unless you held it at a perfect angle. On the newer stuff it's visible even under a moderate UV flood, and it doesn't look like a cheap second print pass. The edges are sharp, not fuzzy, and there's no weird haloing around the text.

Hologram overlay construction has also tightened up. The overlay seems to be bonded more cleanly—less air trapping around the edges, and the rainbow foil aligns better with the UV design underneath. When I flip it under a blacklight, you can see the pattern shift smoothly from the visible holographic interference to the UV-induced glow without a sudden cutoff. That's a big improvement, tbh. Older templates often had a visible seam where the overlay ended, which scanners would flag instantly.

Perforation pattern quality is another area where the UV test reveals a lot. On these newer templates, the micro-perfs (usually the DOB or a state abbreviation) are uniform in size and spacing when viewed under UV backlighting. There's no jagged edges or incomplete punch-through. I've also noticed that the UV-reactive material around the perfs doesn't "bleed" into the holes like it used to. On older ones, the ink would sometimes bridge across the gaps, creating a solid blob instead of clean dots.

As for scanner test results—I've run a handful of these newer templates through a few common ID scanners (the ones with both white light and 365nm UV illumination). The UV features are consistently triggering the expected responses. The ghost image registers as a separate data point, the perforations pass the backlight check, and the UV seal doesn't cause any false alerts for counterfeit ink. The only thing I'd still watch out for is the intensity of the UV green/blue glow on some templates. It's much closer to real state issue now, but a few batches still hit a little too bright under the scanner's UV diode. It passes, but barely, honestly.

Overall, the UV on the current generation templates is a massive step up. The ghost image clarity and the integration with the hologram overlay are what stand out to me most. If you're still sitting on old stock, it's worth upgrading just for the UV accuracy alone—scanners are getting smarter, and the old milkiness or misalignment will get you caught.

UV is usually spot on. Its the first thing I check too