You can use a used POS camera from ebay or spend $1500 on a fancy new DSLR with all the gadgets. You could make the frame from PVC, wood, iron, aluminum, whatever. You could use a $100 printer or spend $2500 on a Shinko like they use in the photolab. You can spend as little or as much money as you want to make something that’s totally customized to your own needs. The fun of this hack is mostly in the physical component assembly–designing and making the booth, picking out the right selection of camera/computer/printer for your needs, and making something really cool. And if you have a compatible canon camera, it gets even cheaper. So if you have a computer and photo printer already, you could do this for pretty cheap. I don’t recommend inkjet but you could go that way if you had an inkejet lying around. If you don’t care about reliability, you could buy a cheap dye-sub printer for $100: it just might not hold up for long and you’ll be forever replacing paper and ink at high cost. If you want good quality prints, you can’t save on the printer, although you sometimes see that model available used for less. I don’t count the frame because that is an individual choice–you make whatever frame/cloth setup you like best for whatever is in your budget)
–computer: touchscreen Asus all-in-one from Amazon, $500, but you could use your existing windoze box for free if you wanted. –AC adaptor for camera from Amazon: $20 or so
–software: PSRemote, $85 (I think it’s $95 now) Red Bull would have to be putting out a LOT of prints to go through thousands of dollars a month.įor those following along, my fixed costs are: High-quality prints, they sell a perforated paper specially designed for photobooths, and the consumables cost is pretty low, about $100 for a 3-hour event with heavy use. If you want to use this for multiple events, a Sony UPCX1 is the preferred option for photobooths. You can get cheap canon dye-sub printers that are slow but good for a single event. To do it right, you need a solid dye-sublimation printer. They’re slow, unreliable, and prone to smudges as well as bleeding when they get wet (from wet hands from holding a drink with condensation or spilling a drink on it). If you want it free, build your own and open source it, no need to mess with Chris. Ripping off M$oft is one thing, ripping off a genuinely nice guy and very hard-working programmer is pretty sleazy.
His product is very fairly priced for pro-quality software and there is a free trial version if you just want to mess around with it.
I couldn’t find any–if you could point to the scripting you did in Linux that would be much appreciated.īTW, if you steal the DSLR Remote Pro software using that link above, you’re stealing from a real programmer, a one-man shop run by a guy named Chris Breeze. I looked everywhere for free software (mostly out of principal, since the $85 I paid for the software was a tiny fraction of the event costs and ended up being well worth it).