Advice on printing plastic cards on a Zebra P430i

[SocrateCP]

Hi, new member here. I'm sorry if i'm posting in the wrong place.

Does anyone here know about the Zebra P430i and plastic cards in general ?
I have a very small business mostly craft items, posters, flyers and very short printing runs for friends businesses.

Anyway I recently bought a new Zebra P430i with the intention of printing membership cards and gift cards for a couple of local businesses, but i'm having a lot of problems, these machines are very different from paper printing. Zebra themselves are not very helpful and the manual was very sparse.

I am using standard graphics programmes such as Irfanview and Imageforge to make up the designs, but the result on the card isn't as good as I thought it would be, and sometimes a little overlap with colours.
Also the black is quite grey and fuzzy, I attempted to print a barcode but the result wasn't dark or sharp enough, even after adjusting contrast and brightness.

My questions are,

Is there an ideal graphics programme to use with this ? (I can't afford actual card software)

Is there a way to get part of the image (such as barcodes) to print using only the black part of the ribbon ?

How do I use the double sided feature of this machine ?

Any other tips would be welcome too
Many thanks.

[phoenix]

If you can't afford "proper" software, then look to good open-source options such as Gimp (for raster work) and Inkscape (for vector work).

If you used Inkscape for example, your artwork will be crisp (unless you place low-resolution graphics etc of course), and you can ensure that your blacks are 100% black, not a tint etc.

Where are you sourcing your barcodes? What format and resolution are they? If you download an EPS and open it in Inkscape it should be sharp and crisp. If you're taking a web snapshot then it's going to be crap.