People hear “riso” and picture a fancy printer. It is closer to a stencil duplicator: a machine built in the 1980s to run off thousands of parish newsletters cheaply, which happens to lay down ink in a way that designers fell in love with forty years later.
Each colour lives on its own drum. The machine burns your artwork into a stencil, wraps it around the drum and presses ink through it onto the paper. Soy-based ink, no heat, no toner. The sheet comes out slightly damp and needs an hour before the second colour can go on.
That is the whole trick, and it is also the whole limitation: one colour per pass, a handful of inks that cannot be mixed, and no way to print a photograph the way an inkjet does. What you get instead is a flat, saturated colour that sits on the paper rather than in it.
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