Review: Viva Jyoshi

Took pictures for this review a while ago but wasn’t inspired to write about this machine and then forgot I’d taken the pictures. It’s not bad, just nothing special… but let’s take a look anyway.

According to it’s promotional blurb Viva Jyoshi’s key points are beautiful skin, collages, and a choice of backgrounds with four colour schemes: pastel, oshare simple (monotone, animal print) retro girly (floral, beige and natural) and season (I’m not sure but I think this changes depending on what season you are in).

There’s a monitor on the side while you are waiting showing the key points from the machine.

Like Lady By Tokyo, this machine is black inside with directional lights. This is to avoid the flattened features that you can get with all white machines.

The start screen:

You have the standard two eye options, as always I went for natural. Even with this option when I used this machine with a guy friend he did the obligatory “An alien! I look like an alien!” thing

Five skin tone options, I choose the second lightest (apparently it’s the most common choice).

This is where you make your background theme choice. From l-r: pastel, retro girly, oshare simple and season. They aren’t radically different in my opinion, but we went for oshare simple in the end.

The way you take pictures is the same as Lady By Tokyo and Milk Beauty. The six poses are at the bottom and you blast through each one. There are five square pictures and one not-quite-full-length. My friend hadn’t taken purikura like this before so she was a bit confused by it as she was expecting to choose backgrounds next.

After taking your pictures you can then choose your collage. The collage uses the pictures you’ve already taken so you don’t take a new picture just for the collage like Bambi-Na.

Here are the collage choices, you’ll notice they use image models not your actual purikura in the previews.

Then you get to add your names for the collage and for stamps.

You enter in hiragana but you can change the alphabet afterwards if you like.

Incidentally, my other Japanese friend used this to correct the romanisation of her name. In hiragana it’s ひづる which comes up as Hiduru but she prefers Hizuru. Just to show that Japanese people need this function too!

If you want to change the backgrounds on this machine you can do it during the decorating time by tapping the button indicated. This is a little annoying if the machine is busy as choosing nice backgrounds can eat into your decorating time!

Background choices:

Name stamps:

Blog themed stamps:

Messages:

These stamps are all kind of simple, but if you look at them you’ll notice that a lot of them are thin fonts or lines and in plain black or white. I’ve used this machine about three times now and each time it was incredibly difficult to place the stamps where they could be seen on clothes. The only way it could work is if both people are wearing dark colours or both people are wearing light colours. A simple border outline would make the stamps and messages so much more usable.

Seasonal stamps:

Hearts:

Partly transparent:

Message tape:

Pen samples:

Once you have finished decorating you can choose your layout. The blank space in the design means you can choose which one you want to be bigger. This machine doesn’t have any options to print the collage as it’s supposed to be a mobile phone background.

Well, I do think that the machine prints out quite nicely and gives you nice skin without losing facial definition. But the decorations are uninspired and difficult to use because of the colours. I would use it again but only if I wanted a simple mood. But if I wanted that and Lady By Tokyo was there I would choose Lady!

Our pictures:

In the end this is how I got a stamps to work:

And the collage:

FLLOW YOUR HEART indeed…