Booths that let guests snap and print photos at events have become increasingly popular, but their rental prices are high enough to limit how often you might want to use one. Enter the HP Sprocket Photobooth ($599.99). It may (or may not) cost more for a single event, but once you’ve got it, you can use it repeatedly with no additional costs other than Zink photo paper. It’s ideal for giving you and your guests keepsake pictures even for modest events where the cost of renting is off the table—at your next Halloween or birthday party, say. At this writing, the Sprocket Photobooth has few competitors. The only other one we’ve noticed is the Arcade1Up Photobooth. However, the HP model delivers enough, both in terms of picture quality and its generally well-thought-out interface, to earn our first Editors’ Choice award for the category.
Design: Take a Picture and Print It
From a technology standpoint, the Sprocket Photobooth is essentially a glorified instant camera that lets you snap a picture and immediately print it. What turns it into it a photo booth is the combination of its physical design, its print technology, and its firmware.
The Photobooth includes a carrying handle built into the top and is bigger and heavier than anything you’d call a camera. It weighs 8 pounds, and its official measurements are 21.7 by 13.6 by 2.2 inches (HWD). However, the 2.2 inches is really its thickness, and it’s the right measurement only for roughly the top 15 inches of the height. The bottom angles out from the rest of the unit, on the front side only, making it roughly twice as thick near the bottom as well, which increases the overall depth to roughly 5 inches. The extra depth is taken up by a stand in the back, which folds out so you can rest the unit on a table, giving it a footprint of 13.6 by roughly 10 inches.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
As an alternative to placing the Photobooth on a flat surface, HP includes a wall mount and a door mount (for hooking over the top of a door). However, I wouldn’t mount it on a door that might be opened while the Photobooth is on it. And note that it has to be plugged into a power outlet, so you can only use a door that has one nearby.
The power button is on the top panel, and the power connector is on the left side, near the bottom. Everything else of interest is on the front. The top portion is dominated by a 10.1-inch touch-panel LCD surrounded by a rectangular LED light ring (an apparent contradiction in terms, but that’s what HP calls it).
(Credit: M. David Stone)
The LCD offers a 1,280-by-800-pixel resolution in portrait orientation. Among other features, it lets you preview a picture before taking it and give commands, like choosing the frame to use for your next picture. It also offers useful information when you need it, including a 3-2-1 countdown before snapping the picture. The camera lens is centered in the top strip of the light ring.
One particularly nice touch is that the LCD, light ring, and lens combination is on a single panel that can pivot plus or minus 8 degrees to tilt up or down. This lets you adjust the angle for the position people are most likely to be in (sitting or standing) when taking pictures, making it easy for guests to conveniently view the picture they’re about to take, even while reaching out to the touch panel to start the countdown.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
The printer is in the portion of the front panel that’s at an angle to the rest, with the input tray on the right and the output tray on the left. The Zink technology it uses has a reputation for not offering the same high-quality output as other choices, but in my tests, the photo quality was a match for small-format dye-sub or inkjet printers, offering 287-by-287-dot-per-inch (dpi) resolution and none of the obvious graininess or off-target color that’s common in Zink printers. Note that edge-to-edge printing is not an option, so all photos have a white border. They also have a sticky back, hidden beneath a peel-off backing.
The Zink technology also offers some advantages. It takes only one pass, instead of the multiple passes of dye-sub printers, so it won’t tempt people to try pulling out the photo before the final pass; it means zero chance of ink smudging from wet fingers, which can happen with inkjets; and it requires no ink cartridge or dye roll. Just load the paper, with its embedded dye crystals, and it’s set to print.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
Based on list prices, the cost per photo works out to roughly 90 cents each if you buy HP’s 100-photo pack, or as much as $1.15 each with the 20-photo pack.
Setup and Testing: Fine-Tune Your Event Photos
The Photobooth is easy to set up and use, mostly thanks to self-explanatory options and setup screens. Once you get past the physical setup—which requires no more than putting the Photobooth on a flat surface, loading the Zink paper in the input tray, and plugging it in—the touch screen and firmware are what turn the camera and printer combination into a photo booth.
The first time you turn it on, it will tell you to enter a PIN, which you’ll need any time you want to change settings, define settings for a new event, or set it so that guests can use it to take pictures.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
The first setup screen offers three choices: My Events, Gallery, and Settings. My Events is where you define the picture-taking options for any given event. (More details on this shortly.)
(Credit: M. David Stone)
Gallery is where photos are stored, so there won’t be any when you first look. Once you take some, they’re stored in named sessions. A three-dot menu for each session lets you rename it, delete it, or upload photos in it to the cloud. After uploading, the option generates a QR code for downloading the files to store or send to others.
I found all the choices under Settings and elsewhere straightforward enough not to need explanation, but if you run into a problem, the Support option under Settings includes a phone number to call plus the URL and a QR code for the support website.
The My Events option offers a Starter Event already defined, and it lets you create additional events of your own. For each event definition, you can choose one of six Screensavers and select which frames guests can choose from. The software has four categories—Birthdays, Milestones, Holidays, and Entertainment—of 48 to 117 frames each, and multiple subcategories within each of the four. You can also pick which individual frames will be available from the choices in each set.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
Once you’ve set up one or more events, you can make one active by choosing it from the list showing in My Events. You can then set a few additional options for the event before choosing Start, with choices for a maximum number of prints a guest can ask for (1 to 10), whether to allow sharing of files (more on that later), and whether to enable Filters, which gives guests a variety of options, including monochrome, sepia, and various tints.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
The photo-taking screen for guests shows a preview area, complete with a frame if one is chosen, thumbnails of available frames, and thumbnails for Filters if you’ve enabled them. Most of the filter thumbnails don’t show what they do, but the preview image changes to match each filter as you choose it. Guests can also adjust the brightness of the LED frame to get better lighting, though that shouldn’t be necessary if you adjust it first.
During an event, you’ll have to keep an eye on the printer to make sure it’s running smoothly. Regardless of the size paper pack you buy, the paper comes in sealed packets of 10 photo paper pages each, plus a calibration page that the printer automatically feeds when you first load the packet and close the tray. In our tests, vertical lines started showing up with one packet on every print, starting with the fourth photo. Running the calibration page for that packet through the printer once more solved the problem, but that’s not something you can expect your guests to do. You’ll want to put the calibration page for each packet where you can find it after the printer first reads it.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
Also note that you can load up to two packets at once, but with the printer’s speed— which averaged 90 seconds per print in our tests—the Photobooth could, in principle, run through all 20 prints plus the calibration pages in about 35 minutes. (That’s a good reason not to set the maximum number of allowable prints to 10.) Even with the maximum set to one, and adding an extra 90 seconds to prepare for and take each picture, it could run out of paper in a little less than an hour if it’s getting heavy use.
I also ran into some minor issues with the sharing feature, which lets guests download an image. The download is from the cloud, not directly from the Photobooth, and the device has to upload the image file first, which means the feature is only available when the Photobooth is connected to the internet via Wi-Fi. When it is, the printer shows a message when printing starts that it’s generating a QR code, then shows the code on the screen, which lets guests use their phones to read the code, go to the site, and download the image.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
The issue is that your guests will have to be quick about reading the QR code. The Sprocket Photobooth offers no warning before taking the picture that they’ll have the opportunity to download anything. The code disappears from the screen as soon as the printing stops, and your guests won’t be able to bring it back up. I’d argue that it would be better to disable the QR code sharing rather than risk anyone being frustrated from not getting their phone out and unlocked quickly enough to read the code.
Verdict: Seriously Impressive, Particularly for a First Try
You could categorize the HP Sprocket Photobooth as an instant camera, but that’s akin to saying the Apple iPod was just another MP3 player like its predecessors—which almost nobody used, or even knew about. In both cases, the difference is the interface—both the physical design and the firmware. If you just want to take pictures at an event and hand them out, you could use an instant camera like the film-based Fujifilm Instax Mini 99 and a small-format printer like the dye-sub-based Canon Selphy CP1500, which lets you print pictures from your phone. Both are Editors’ Choice picks in their categories, as well as less expensive than the Sprocket Photobooth.
That said, if you want to give guests a self-serve photo-booth experience, the Sprocket Photobooth is an impressive pick. You might also want to take a look at the Arcade1Up Photobooth, which is less expensive than the HP model. However, the HP Sprocket Photobooth model offers a larger screen, a larger print size, and other features that make it both well worth the higher price and our first Editors’ Choice pick for a personal photo booth.
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The Bottom Line
The HP Sprocket Photobooth takes and prints good-quality 3-by-4-inch keepsake photos, making it an excellent lower-cost alternative to renting a photo booth for commemorating special events.
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About M. David Stone
Contributing Editor
