Find out more about a speed debate that reveals the unique place that corporate photo booths sit as both a way to preserve memories and a fun part of an event.
How Quickly Should Corporate Photo Booths Produce Pictures?
One of the biggest dilemmas of the past two decades is the role of the photo booth in an age of digital cameras and instantly shareable social media platforms such as Instagram. In the 2020s, corporate photo booths found their answer.
From when it was first developed in 1925 by Anatol Josepho up until the early 2000s, its biggest selling point was speed and convenience.
Whether you wanted to take candid pictures of a business partner, make memories on a date or need a uniform picture for a passport, you could just walk into a photo booth, pay a nominal sum and have a strip of photos ready to cut out and use as you see fit.
The problem with this business model was the rise of the digital camera, and especially the camera phone.
Even though the entire process from entering the booth to taking the prints typically took less than five minutes, a photo booth could not beat the instantaneous versatility of pulling a phone out and taking a quick selfie.
How could photo booths compete with instant? The answer is that they did not have to.
Specifically, the purpose of photo booths changed to put the experience first and to make the ritual of having it taken as important as the finished tangible product.
This was not necessarily new; video game company Atlus (best known today for the Persona series) released Print Club in 1995, which established an entire Japanese subculture known as purikura.
Purikura was a genre of photo booth where people pay money to take pictures, use silly frames and effects to play about and personalise them, before receiving a set of stickers to take home as a memento.
This went from being a relative, albeit highly successful niche, to being the core selling point of photo booths, and everywhere from arcades to bars to weddings and even corporate conferences feature a photo booth for the same reason they were beloved by Japanese teenagers in the 1990s.
So, how quickly should photo booths take and print photos?
In the modern age, it is almost irrelevant. As long as the ritual of taking the photographs is fun enough and the wait is not too long (over five minutes is usually pushing it), it does not matter how long it takes.