
World’s First 3D Printing Photo Booth to Open in Japan - esolyt
http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2012/11/09/worlds-first-3d-printing-photo-booth-to-open-in-japan/
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JeremyHerrman
I ran a 3D Photo Booth at the 2012 Pittsburgh Mini Maker Faire back in
September. While not nearly as cool as the one in the article, we did scan
over 90 people over the course of the day and print out over 40 at the fair
with two makerbots.

<http://jherrman.com/2012/10/introducing-scanbooth/>

We couldn't have scanned so many people without some automation for
streamlining the scan process and cleaning up the scans for printing. I posted
the rails app we used and automation scripts on github:

<https://github.com/jherrm/scanbooth>

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TazeTSchnitzel
For those unfamiliar with Japanese currency, the Yen isn't subdivided into
cents or pence like many Western currencies, so shift the decimal point two
places to the left (i.e., think of 100 JPY as $1.00)

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frontier
For currency conversion just google like this.. "21000 yen to usd", "21000 yen
to aud", etc..

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nnnnni
It's 264 to 528 USD. Wow.

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ekianjo
Pretty cool for weddings: have customized figures of the spouses on the big
cake. Since in Japan weddings are extremely expensive (up to several years of
savings go into it!) I would not be surprised they start to include this kind
of service in the near future.

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jbm
That's only true to a certain extent.

My wedding cost quite a bit less, although my wife and I decided to do it in
Canada and fly over people instead. Many people do a "Hawaii Wedding", fly the
guests over, and it costs much less than the marriages ceremonies in Japan.
(You talk about industries waiting to be disrupted..)

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jtagen
Wondering how they are printing these. Not aware of a plastic printer that can
do that kind of color - are these hand painted afterwards, or come off the
machine looking like that?

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chao-
The maker-bot style, plastic printers are not the only printers out there. For
example, I know that the current Z-Corp printers create figures out of a sort
of powder and literally use inkjet ink to put the full spectrum of color you
would expect right into the surface of the model as it is made (it can get to
be a millimeter or so deep, so it doesn't just scratch off). Although you do
have to coat it in a lacquer/sealant to strengthen the model post-print. I
wonder how the Japanese machine accomplishes this, or if it even needs to?

My experience comes from some work I did for a startup that has such a
machine, and uses it for similar purposes (human figures). They've got a
decent page showing off their examples:
<http://www.actionfigurelabs.com/figure-gallery>

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uniclaude
I'm not sure this concept is very new, last year, Danny Choo made a relatively
detailed article[1] about Clone Factory, offering a similar service for about
three times the price of the large version.

[1]:[http://www.dannychoo.com/post/en/26119/Human+Cloning+in+Japa...](http://www.dannychoo.com/post/en/26119/Human+Cloning+in+Japan.html)

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randomfool
$530 for a 10" statue. Super cool, can't wait for the price to drop.

