Purikura Review: Call Me Queen

Here’s a machine that I took a long while ago on a test location, but for some reason took a loooong time to come near me!

First of all, I’d like to apologise for the focus of thephotos, I don’t know if it was the lights or the shiny shiny screen but it was hard to get good shots!

Anyway, first thing that caught my eye was the movie star style screen. I thought this was a proper outside screen at first but it’s just for displaying information about the machine.

Inside there’s quite a lot of lights, more than a lot of machines seem to have recently. The lens has a clock design all around it which was cute.

First of all you take a kind of test shot, don’t worry if you are caught off-guard as this shot doesn’t count for your final six.

You use this test shot to choose your course, I think that’s actually a really good idea to see how the different courses will look. Usually you just have pictures of the models and they have different make-up and styles so it’s hard to tell how that will look on your own pictures.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t see much difference in the courses so we just chose randomly! The choices were Rabbit, Cat and Queen for some reason.

Then you choose your backgrounds, they are all in sets so you only make one choice here. There are four different tabs though so you get quite a bit of choice.

We chose a Halloween set from the ‘themes’ tab.

Once you go inside the main menu is set up like a cosmetics set. This will come back later! Anyway the sections are pen, stamps & rollers, letters/messages, recommended and colour.

There are a lot of things going on in this machine, you already have a ton of pen options…

…but you can also make your own pens! I’ve never seen this before, and you can probably find pens in the regular section that do the job but it’s a nice little touch if you have something specific in mind. You can choose between neon and simple…

Then a pattern…

And your colour…and you can use your own pen!

Under the stamps tab things are organised by motif/theme, there’s colourful:

star/sparkle:

and things like heart, neon, simple etc. Each section has stamps, roller stamps and frames.

Under the ‘moji’ or character tabs you have messages and fonts. There’s English:

These banner style ones:

Event ones:

Regular initials:

And Korean characters! I have seen a couple of Korean stamps before but this is the first machine I’ve seen with the (I assume) full character set. It has an approximation of the hiragana below it. However the only Korean I know is “annyeonghaseyo” and “nae chingu” I have no idea how accurate it is, or even if it’s possible to be accurate with Japanese to Korean. I tried to write our names on our purikura so if there’s any Korean speakers reading maybe you could check??

There’s also a section just for speech bubble stamps:

And, as if you weren’t overwhelmed by all the choice already, there’s more building tools! You can create your own message stamp in this section too!

The date stamps are also under this section and I really like that they have some with your own purikura on them!

Under the cosmetic tab “colour” you can find EVEN MORE stamps, rollers and frames, this time arranged by colour so you can match to your outfits!

Then we come to the ‘recomended’ tab on the cosmetics panel. This is the cool stuff that most machine list under ‘special’

You have a roller to make your face smaller.

Sparkles that only work on your hair. They only work on black or brown hair though, light brown and blonde doesn’t register!

This is where you will find the current seasons stamps.

And your own mini-puri stamps:

These ones are slightly old school background stamps. They are patterns that only appear on the background so that even with a plain colour you can jazz it up a bit.

Another thing that older machine had was the auras, you choose the style and it will automatically go around the people in the picture. I’m happy to see these again!

And more building! You can build your own ‘disguise’ stamp to add to someone's face. Choose all the parts you want and it will become one stamp for you to use.

Now remember that the main panel is a cosmetics case? Well I was randomly tapping and I hit the applicator section by accident which opened up a whole secret tab!

The theme of the secret tab is cosmetics, it’s nothing majorly exciting but a secret section is quite a nice idea I think!

Once you get done with all the options it’s layout time. All the layouts seemed to be pretty basic but I’m not too keen on fancy layouts anyway.

Well, overall I think the machine has changed quite a lot from the test one I saw. The test one messed with the face shape too much, and printed out with quite weak colours. I remember not being very impressed with it. But with moving the face shape rollers to our control it looks better and the print out was nice and vivid.

I do think that there is soooo much going on that it would take a couple of goes to get used to, both my friend and I take a lot of purikura and we were both saying “There’s too much! What shall I do?”

I think I would take this one again but it would depend if I wanted a full length shot as all of these are close ups.

Also I’m not a member of this company so we could only download one each. My scanner doesn’t like me right now so I took a camera photo of the rest! Hope it gives you an idea of the machine though!