Risograph vs Offset: Choose Your Poison

There are two schools of small-press printing, and they hate each other quietly over drinks.

One school runs a risograph. The other sends its files to an offset printer and waits. I have used both, usually in the same month, and I have been wrong about each of them in turn.

The machine you can love

A risograph is a digital stencil duplicator: a machine that burns a master from your artwork and pushes ink through it onto the page, one colour per pass. Riso Kagaku, a Japanese company, makes the ones we all use. They are bulky, they smell of soy ink, and they are not entirely reliable.

The look is the reason people keep them. The colours are bright and slightly odd. The grain is visible. Two inks laid over each other do something that a screen would never predict. Misregistration, the small shift between one pass and the next, is not a fault but a signature.

If you want a zine, a poem pamphlet or a small art book with a hundred copies, a risograph is almost unbeatable. It is cheap per sheet, fast to set up and forgiving of a messy file.

The machine you can trust

Offset lithography is the opposite temperament. A plate for each colour, a huge press, a crew who know what they are doing. The results are even, the blacks are black and a photograph comes out looking like the photograph. At a thousand copies, the cost per book falls steeply.

The cost of getting started is the price. Plates, setup, make-ready, paper bought in bulk and a minimum run. A hundred copies of anything on offset is poor value, and often the printer will politely decline.

How I choose

My rule is a crude one. Under about three hundred copies, or whenever the book is meant to look handmade, I reach for the risograph. Over five hundred, or whenever there are photographs or large areas of solid black, offset.

In between, I argue with myself for a week and then pick whichever is cheaper that day.

The regrets, in order

The riso regrets: a jam on the last sheet of the last signature. A cold week when the ink would not dry. A cover that looked electric on the screen and came out the colour of weak tea.

The offset regrets: a proof you approved too fast. A run of a thousand with a typo on page 14. A pallet delivered to the wrong door at seven on a Monday morning.

Neither of them is a regret that stays, except the typo. The typo is for life.

What the reader sees

Here is my honest opinion, which will annoy both camps. Readers do not care. They care that the book is readable, the cover is arresting and the thing feels like it was made by a person. A well-bound riso pamphlet beats a lazy offset paperback every time. A beautiful offset novel beats a sloppy riso one.

Pick the tool that matches the book, and then pay attention to the details, because the details are what will be left when the argument is forgotten. For the list we are about to put through one machine or the other, see the spring list.

Names, places and events in this demo are fictional.