Magnetic developer is a fluid which makes the magnetic information written on magnetic tape or the

magnetic stripe The term digital card can refer to a physical item, such as a memory card on a camera, or, increasingly since 2017, to the digital content hosted as a virtual card or cloud card, as a digital virtual representation of a physical card. They share ...

of a

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ATM card An ATM card is a payment card or dedicated payment card issued by a financial institution (i.e. a bank) which enables a customer to access their financial accounts via its and others' automated teller machines (ATMs) and to make approved point of ...

visible to the naked eye. Magnetic developer can be found in liquid or aerosol form. When applied to a magnetic stripe, suspended metal particles will be attracted to the magnetically charged regions of the stripe as the liquid evaporates. Magnetic developer can be used to troubleshoot problems with magnetic stripes and the equipment that encodes and reads them. By making the encoding visible, one can see how encoding head alignment affects the position of the data tracks, and observe any possible magnetic damage that has occurred on the magnetic stripe.

See also