Review: Masuwaka Tsubasa's BF Manual

For my first review here I’ll be looking at Masuwaka Tsubasa’s newest machine, BF Manual. It should be really easy to spot if you are looking for it, it’s white and pastels and has huge pictures of Tsubasa and her husband Umeda Naoki all over it. According to the front of the machine BF can stand for Beauty Face, Best Fashion and Boy Friend.

When you first go in you might notice that the lights cover most of the front wall compared to other machines with smaller lights. I think this does a lot to make your skin tone perfect and bright! (I guess this is Beauty Face)

Lights inside

You have the choice of “Friend Course” or “Couple Course” (Boy Friend) we chose the friend course, but one of my objectives this year is to use the couple course! It’s cute that the couple course shows Tsubasa and Naoki whereas the friend course shows Tsubasa and Tsubasa- with different colour hair! On this machine you also have three options of eye size at this point. We went for the middle option as you can always use a little help, but sometimes when the eyes go too big I think I look like a frog!

Friend course or couple course?

l-r natural to big eyes

In the background section you’re again seeing double with Tsubasa! There’s a choice of full length to show off your outfit (Best Fashion) or close ups. Out of six pictures you can only choose up to two full length poses. The back grounds for the full length are so-so but it’s nice to have that option when you want to show off your outfit, which is often my excuse for taking purikura!

close-ups

full length

The backgrounds and guide poses for the close up versions are really cute and it was hard to choose! One thing to mention here is that the close up poses are in a square format, it’s nice for two people but a little hard to fit three or more into the space.

Full length with four people

Close up with four people

Once we are decorating then there are a few things that make this machine special. One is that at the beginning of this you enter your name (in hiragana) and then once you are in you have personalised stamps to use. The stamps use hiragana and romaji (alphabet) versions so think if your name would look strange in romaji. For instance my name is Samantha, in hiragana さまんさ which turns into romaji as ‘samansa’. That looks weird to me so I used my nickname さまんちゃ which I also use in English so it worked out. My friend didn’t think of anything so Vanessa became Banessa…

Personalised stamps

It has the usual array of stamps along with hair colour change pens (which don’t work on blonde by the way) and falsh eyelash stamps. While the false eyelash stamps can be resized and tilted they are just stamps so may look a little strange.

Eyelash stamps

There’s also a good amount of message options in English and Japanese and I liked that there were some stamps just for fashion “Today’s Code” (code is the romanisation of コーデ which would best be translated as outfit but oh well) “Point” “Best Item” etc. I like to take purikura when I have a new outfit so this made me happy!

One really useful thing was that in the corner of your screen there’s a little square that shows you what stamp or pen your friend is using right then. I often see my friend using something cool and then waste time trying to find it, but on this machine you can just touch it on your side and steal their idea, mwahahaha!

"Use the same stamp as the person next to you."

Another useful trick is that each person can choose a different layout for your printed pictures, so you can have different sizes from each other. We ended up choosing the same layout but the option was there! They also printed out already separated so no need to cut! Having said that, if you were three or more people it would be much harder than usual to figure out which layout to choose. We did this machine with four people once and it took a bit of cutting to work it out.

Printouts

You can also send your picture to an iPhone as well as a regular mobile phone address- huzzah! And you have the option of putting your purikura into the album so other people can view it when they are waiting for theirs to print. Unfortunately we didn’t see anything interesting in the album while we were waiting.

I think the machine printed out nicely with a clean slightly pastel palette like the outside of the machine. However my friend would like to point out that she felt it was too pale, especially as we used the middle setting for the skin tone instead of my usual lighter tone. I’ve used this machine a few times now and I would rank it as my second favourite at the moment.

Close up with name stamps

full length (automatic date on the frame)

Good Points: themed stamps, couple course, full-length pictures, iPhone compatible, personalised stamps, use the stamp your friend is using, separate layouts, pre-cut prints,

Bad Points: difficult for more than two people, foreign names might not work very well on the name stamps, paler than usual settings

Overall: Love it. Will definitely be back with a review of the couple course if I can!

Website (Japanese)