All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
This is the Authentic Boardwalk Photo Booth, and it appears to be something of an expensive, anachronistic and rather pointless toy.
First, the price. The booth costs $10,000. We doubt it's aimed at the home party market, but as it lacks a coin slot, there doesn't seem to be a way to press it into service and make some of that money back. For all that cash, you do get a a sturdy box: it is constructed from powder-coated 14-gauge steel, actually making it sturdy enough to cost another $2000 for shipping (it comes straight from the factory).
So why would you buy this instead of, say, the now rather cheap looking Nikon D3X ($8000)? You wouldn't. While the booth can snap and then print four photos in just 16 seconds, it produces only small, black and white pictures. How small? 2"x2" and just 72dpi.
The internals are somewhat mysterious. The product site lists the booth as using a Polaroid-made thermal printer, but also tells us that the machine comes with two rolls of "film." That's enough for 3,200 pictures, but replacement rolls go for $500 each, or "400 sessions of four-frame photo strips". That is, incredibly, over a dollar a strip.
However you look at this, it seems to be a bad deal. Unless you can actually put a coin box on the side, in which case it looks like a really big, really crappy camera with which to rip other people off. It does, though, have one thing you won't find on any other camera: A built-in chair.
Product page [Hammacher Schlemmer via Uncrate]
