Your camera roll,
made physical.
HALFTONE is a tiny risograph studio that turns the photos rotting in your phone into grainy, two-color art prints — the kind you frame, gift, and squint at happily.
Prints pulled
12,408
Ink pairs
21
Perfect copies
0
Loved by gift-givers, wall-fillers, and people who still like paper.
Today's drums
Six inks, loaded & humming
The Idea
Some photos
deserve to
exist.
You have three thousand photos in your pocket and none in your hands. We think the good ones — the dog mid-zoomie, the beach nobody else got up for — have earned a place on an actual wall.
“
A print you can hold beats
a thousand you scroll past.
— HALFTONE, probably in an apron
Slow printing
One drum, one pass, one color at a time. No rushing the machine.
Two inks only
Limits are the style. Two colors say more than sixteen million.
Never identical
Every pull lands a little different. Yours is the only one like it.
Test swatches, batch 41
The Ink Library
Two drums.
Infinite moods.
Every print gets exactly two inks. Pick a pair and we handle the color separations — or tell us the feeling and we'll pick for you.
See all 21 pairsHouse favourites
Real soy-based riso inks on uncoated paper. Fluoro pink genuinely glows; we can't explain it either.
The Process
From pocket
to paper.
Four steps, one spinning drum, and a machine older than some of our customers.
01
Send us a photo
Any photo. Even the blurry ones — especially the blurry ones. Grain forgives everything.
02
We split the colors
Your photo becomes two halftone layers, one per ink. This is where the magic math lives.
03
The drum spins
Each layer prints in a single pass. Alignment: approximate. On purpose. Mostly.
04
It ships flat
Board-backed, never rolled, with a note about which happy accidents happened to yours.
The Machine
Meet Rosie.
She is the studio.
One secondhand risograph duplicator, born 1998, bought for the price of a decent office chair. Everything on this page comes out of her.
1
Paper feed
Eats 300 gsm municipal card for breakfast. Jams on Mondays, like everyone.
2
The drum
One color per pass. Swapping inks takes eleven seconds — current studio record.
3
Control panel
Fourteen buttons from 1998. We trust four of them.
4
Output tray
Up to 150 prints a minute, when she's in the mood. She is rarely in the mood.
RISO MZ-790
TWO DRUMS LOADED
SOUNDS LIKE A SHY HELICOPTER
The Grain
The smudge
is the point.
Risograph isn't trying to be perfect — that's what makes it feel alive. Up close, your photo dissolves into dots, drift, and glow. These are the features:
Misregistration
The two layers land about a millimetre apart, differently every pass. Twins, never clones.
Halftone dots
Zoom in and the image becomes rhythm — thousands of dots doing an impression of your photo.
The fluoro glow
Fluorescent pink reflects more light than it receives. Physics, but make it fun.
The Misprint Pile
Our best
mistakes.
Not every pull makes it out the door. The nearly-rights retire to a box by the entrance — five bucks each, honor system. No refunds, obviously.
SECONDS SALE · SATURDAYS · WHILE THE BOX LASTSbatch 38 · pull 12
batch 41 · pull 2
batch 39 · pull 7
batch 42 · pull 19
batch 40 · pull 1
The Prints
Paper worth
keeping.
Three ways your photo can live on a wall, a fridge, or someone's very good mail day.
The Postcard
Small, mighty, mailable. The gateway print.
- SizeA6 · 105 × 148 mm
- Paper300 gsm municipal card
- EditionOne of one
The Poster
Frame-ready and loud about it. Most walls' favourite.
- SizeA3 · 297 × 420 mm
- PaperUncoated 170 gsm, off-white
- EditionOne of one
The Zine
Sixteen pages of your month, stapled by hand.
- SizeA5 · 16 pages
- PaperRiso cover + 120 gsm inner
- EditionUp to 50 copies
Come Say Hi
Come smell
the ink.
The studio door is usually open, the drum is usually spinning, and there's usually a misprint pile you can dig through for free. Bring a photo — leave with a plan.
The studio
14 Ledger Lane, Unit B
Open
Wed – Sat, 10 – 6
Turnaround
About a week