Register Two Two-drum desktop duplicator Edition 003
Off by a hair. On purpose.
A desktop duplicator with two ink drums, a 600 dpi stencil head and no interest in pretending to be a laser printer. It lays soy ink on the sheet, one colour at a time, at 130 sheets a minute.
- Speed
- 130 sheets/min
- Stencil
- 600 × 600 dpi
- Drums
- 2 — hot-swap
- Registration
- ± 0.4 mm
- Cost per sheet
- £0.011
A laser printer has never made anyone stop walking.
Digital print is a perfect stranger.
It lands flat, dries instantly, and forgets you.
Ink is different. Ink soaks. Ink sits proud of the sheet.
You can feel a print from across a room.
Two drums, two passes, and somewhere in between — a millimetre of honest human error.
Register Two burns your file into a banana-fibre stencil, wraps it round a drum, and pushes soy ink through 600 pinholes per inch. Nothing is fused. Nothing is heated. The ink stays where paper wants it, which is to say slightly darker at the edges and never quite the same twice.
Run the stack again with the second drum loaded and the two colours land within four tenths of a millimetre of each other. Close enough to read as one image. Loose enough to read as a hand.
“Every sheet is a slightly different opinion of the same file.”
The whole machine, taken apart on the kitchen table.
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Stage 01
The scan
Lay the original on the glass or send a file over USB-C. Either way the machine is only ever looking for one thing: where ink goes and where it doesn’t. There is no grey. There is coverage.
600 dpi · 1-bit · A3+
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Stage 02
The stencil
A thermal head burns the image into a banana-fibre master — roughly 34 million pinholes, in nineteen seconds, with a smell somewhere between a photocopier and a bakery. This is the loudest the machine ever gets.
19 s A4 · 24 s A3 · 220 masters/roll
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Stage 03
The drum
The master wraps a rotating drum with a litre of soy ink inside it. Ink is pushed out, not pressed on. Load drum A with your first colour and leave drum B on the shelf with the second — swapping takes eleven seconds and one hand.
1000 ml · 12 stock inks · 11 s swap
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Stage 04
The pass
Paper meets drum at 4.2 kilopascals and comes out the other side already dry to the touch and never quite dry to the palm. First fifteen sheets run rich, then the density settles. Printers call this waking the drum.
130 sheets/min · 46–210 gsm
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Stage 05
The register
Put the stack back in the tray, swap the drum, pull the second colour. Everything lands within four tenths of a millimetre. That gap is not a defect to be corrected; it is the reason the sheet looks alive when the second ink overprints the first.
± 0.4 mm · overprint = third colour
Stage 01 — The scan
Soy, pigment, and a small amount of showing off.
Riso inks are translucent, so the second one you pull does not cover the first — it mixes with it. Two drums, in practice, is three colours.
- Pigment
- Fluorescent magenta
- Opacity
- Low — overprints well
- Lightfastness
- 2 / 8 — keep it indoors
- Note
- Glows under UV. Ruins scanners.
Stock inks — load a drum
Every pair reprints this page — masthead, diagrams and press included.
Nobody believes registration until they’ve broken it themselves.
This is a working model of the drum. Move the registration off, coarsen the screen, drop the ink density, then pull a print and see what comes out the far side.
No. 0001 / 400
Factory tolerance is 0.4 mm. Anything past 4 mm is a choice.
Low rulings show the dot. High rulings clog on rough stock.
Push past 110 % and the ink starts to set off onto the next sheet.
The angle between the two screens. Close it to 0° and the drums fight.
Pull a print first — then you can keep it.
Everything it is, in numbers.
No configurator, no tiers, no software licence with a monthly fee attached. One machine, two drums, and a parts list we will still be able to service in 2045.
| Print speed | 60 / 80 / 100 / 115 / 130 sheets per minute | Five settings. 100 is the one you’ll use. |
|---|---|---|
| Print resolution | 600 × 600 dpi, 1-bit | Screened in the driver or on the machine. |
| Master creation | 19 s (A4) · 24 s (A3) | 220 masters per roll. |
| Maximum print area | 297 × 432 mm | 10 mm grip edge, always. |
| Paper | 100 × 148 mm to 320 × 450 mm · 46–210 gsm | Uncoated. Coated stock will smear and you will be sad. |
| Drums | 2 supplied · 1000 ml cartridge · 11 s swap | Colour-keyed collars so you can’t cross them. |
| Ink | Soy-based emulsion · 12 stock colours | Rice-bran binder. Compostable cartridge shell. |
| Registration | ± 0.4 mm across an A3 stack | Measured at sheet 1 and sheet 500. |
| Trays | 1000-sheet feed · 1000-sheet receive | Side jogger with a satisfying detent. |
| Interface | USB-C · Ethernet · CUPS / macOS / Windows | Driver is 4 MB and does not phone home. |
| Power | 100–240 V · 220 W printing · 8 W idle | Runs off a standard socket in a shared studio. |
| Noise | 58 dB(A) at 100 spm | A dishwasher. You can take a call over it. |
| Dimensions | 690 × 520 × 425 mm, trays closed | Fits a standard 700 mm worktop with room for a mug. |
| Weight | 63 kg | Two people, or one person and a bad decision. |
| Running cost | £0.011 per A4 at 5 % coverage | Master amortised over a 200-sheet run. |
| Warranty | 5 years · parts guaranteed to 2045 | Exploded diagrams shipped in the box. |
Four studios, one machine each, no press releases.
We bought it to make posters and now we do the whole neighbourhood’s wedding invitations on it. It has paid for itself twice and jammed once, on card we were warned about.
The students stopped asking for the laser printer in about a week. Something about watching the second colour go down changes how they design the first one.
I print at seven in the morning before the studio fills up. It is the only machine I own that sounds like it is enjoying itself.
Twelve people share ours. The drum swap is quick enough that nobody has to book it, which is the actual feature.
Build your docket.
One machine, priced once. Everything else is a thing you can add later without a salesperson getting involved.
Register
Edition 003 opens in March and closes when the four hundredth machine is spoken for. After that, the tooling goes back in the crate until we have something worth changing.