Riso Room

Open to all students

The Risograph is is located in the Rad Lab for your use. Riso Fellows (chosen each term), will print your jobs, which you can pay for with PSU print credits (the same you use for the other Rad Lab printers).

Monday

1:00pm-4:00pm

Alice
6:00pm-7:00pm

Bridger

Tuesday

12:00pm-3:00pm

Jordan D

Wednesday

10:00am-1:00pm

Olivia
6:00pm-8:00pm
Madison & Bridger

Thursday

8:00am-10:00am

Lyndsey Z
2:00pm-5:00pm

Sara Ray

The Riso Room is closed all days the university is closed. See academic calendar here.

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Meet Flo, our resident riso!

A little lady with some spunk—and an attitude to match, Flo will serve up some great prints and Rad Lab memories for you, calling you ‘doll’ and ‘sweetie’ along the way (albeit, passive-aggressively, sometimes)! Flo is here to help with your printing needs! As long as you can deal with a paper jam or two along the way!

The Risograph printer, is based on the stencil method of printing, much like screen printing. While the machine looks very much like a photocopier, it functions quite differently. Black & white artwork is sent to the Riso either from the connected desktop pc, or on the scanned on top of the machine. The image is ‘burnt’ on to a paper-like master, which can then be used to duplicate it up to thousands of times. The master wraps automatically around an ink drum. The ink is pushed through the screen/master, and then prints onto paper that makes contact with the drum.
There are various reasons, but perhaps the biggest one is that the Risograph allows you to print with ink colors that digital printers simply cannot achieve—rich blues, fluorescents and more.
The Risograph also allows you to explore printing in a more basic sense, as it requires you to print each color individually. This allows for exciting overprinting possibilities as well as unexpected ‘happy accidents’.
Please read this RisoGuide for a quick start on preparing to print. For a more in depth look, review this Risograph_Intro_Presentation prepared about the Risograph. This handy app, Spectrolite, helps you separate colors (great if you are printing a photograph in more than one color) and do other things like preview your job.