Basic infos about riso-printing.
For further questions or specific inquiries please contact us via info@verschiedenebilder.com

The first riso-machine was launched in the 80s by the japanese company RISO Kagaku Cor­poration. Riso­graphy as a printing technique offered a quick and cheap way to duplicate, mostly used in schools and offices. In it’s form and technical fun­ction Riso oscillates between offset-, screenprint and a copy machine. Often used in the fields of art, design and (self-)publishing, the small imperfections of those (sometimes obsolete) machines offer a new approach to printing as an art form.

Riso-printing works with oil-based inks. Each color needs to be printed separately, one after the other. To exactly define what to print, you need greyscale-information – one file / layer for each color. This file will be processed (raster­ized) by the Riso and burnt into a master-paper (master), which will be the template for printing. Through the master it is defined where ink will print onto the paper and where not. After the printing is done, the master is disposed, so a new one can take it’s place.

Maximum size is A3 – no bleed. Sometimes we fold A2 down to A3, and print both sides. Some­times we think about trying that trick with A1 paper. But we are scared of the consequences.

With Riso you can print small ed­itions, but as usual in printing, the more you print, the chea­per one copy gets. We have a minimum edition of 10 for one color, 20 for two colors, 30 for three colors, and so on. The most cost inten­sive is our work-time for data and print prepa­ration. Printing itself is often quite quickly done.

Costs and estimated production time depend on several variables. The more info* we have, the easier we can calculate for you. If you are not sure about those variables, just attach us a preview file – we are happy to suggest some possible implementations.

*info regarding type, size, color(s), edition, paper­(-ideas), cutting and/or binding and data preparation.