Review: Sugary

This machine is a little unusual because it is from a company (Bandai-Namco) that doesn’t have too many other machines and those it does have seem to be older. This is the company’s return/break in to the market and it has been quite heavily publicised in magazines.

It’s actually a little strange that Bandai-Namco don’t have a heavier presence in the purikura world considering that they are the company that collaborated with Egg magazine to create Eggnam.
Anyway, inside the machine has a wall of lights surrounding the screen but they felt a lot more muted than the bright Lumi3 ones. There’s a couple of extra directional lights above and below which helps to avoid flattening your face.

The two courses are based on colour palettes, the sherbet course is lighter pastels whereas the smoky course is more earth tones. We went with Smoky.

You have two options for eye size, the larger picture is the larger eyes so if you want natural eyes choose the smaller picture.

Next comes the usual five skin tone options, as always I chose the second lightest.

Next you have to choose shapes, you can either choose square (on the left) or landscape/portrait (on the right). We went with the square option.

There were quite a lot of options for frames, including a special “sugary” tab which had vintage-collagey type frames:

Simple:

Colourful:

Simple frames:

Colourful frames:

So many of the backgrounds/frames were cute it was really hard to choose and we almost ran out of time!
After taking the pictures you choose up to six you want as usual. Just tap them to choose. Then it’s on to decorating!

This machine had a lot of cute stamps and things, it was fun to decorate and unusually for me I scrapped everything and started over a couple of times because I found something I liked better.
One of the special things you can do is make polaroid style stamps. Unlike other machines that make similar style stamps from your pictures, on this machine you can add your own marker style text.

As you can see you can add both English and Japanese hiragana.

In the other sections there are special ‘sugary’ stamps, they also have a vintage/decoupage/ collage look to them.


Another thing that makes this machine a bit different is that the image models were actually involved in designing some stamps! You can see them designing the stamps a bit in this YouTube video (I also favourited it on my channel for future reference) I’m not too keen on the stamps but I like the idea that the models get a say in producing the machine. That’s one of my life dreams!


This machine also has corner set stamps. It’s nice that they are separate stamps because if someone’s face is in the corner you can still decorate the other three corners.

Almost all machines have date stamps but this one also has calendar stamps. So if you choose a layout with a big version you can have your own personalised calendar!

There’s a main tab called “sets” this is a set of pens, stamps, and small messages that go together. This is nice if you don’t have much time.


Again these have a nice scrapbooking feel to them.
In the message section there is a tape making function that has the cutest font I have ever seen on purikura!

And the individual characters are also cute:

Here’s something different, this machine has message stamps in Korean! I have absolutely no idea what they say but they are under themed tabs like “friend” and “love” so you can just guess!

And a few stamps/pens examples for you:




After decorating you get to choose your layout:

And which to send to your mobile phones:

As a bonus you also get sent polaroid style versions of the purikura you choose to send to your phone:

Overall I have to say that I LOVE this machine. It’s appeal is in it’s overall theme and style rather than any technical gimmick. I think if you don’t like this style then it’s not them machine for you. You can make some really different looking purikura from this. I’m just sad that we don’t have one in my city! But as there’s one in my friend’s city it’s all good!
Another thing to note is that the print-out was slimmer than other machines. It means that your pictures are a little smaller than other machines pictures are. I think that’s maybe the only thing I didn’t really like because it makes filling up my album awkward!
Here’s the pictures sent from the machine:




And the others I scanned: