Honest review on Haengbok studio...

⚠️DISCLAIMER: the review i'm sharing in this post is solely based on MY personal experience and not to be representative of others!

i first stumbled upon this "early 2000s-esque" neoprint photobooth on tiktok and I had to drag my friend to try it out with me for the nostalgia because the last i had taken a photobooth like this was in primary school lol 😆😆 unfortunately i was left w a disappointing experience and heres why:

firstly, the 24HR studio had various photobooths, each printing a different type of film (i.e normal films/transparent films), BUT there was only ONE photobooth for this neoprint themed photobooth (pic 2), so the queue did get pretty long (the line extended to the steps) 😵‍💫 and apparently its normal for people to queue for up to 2 hours..which is insane to me for a photobooth 😬, my friend and i decided to leave the queue as it wasn't moving for like 20 minutes to go karaoke, but when we came back there was still a line, though shorter.

we were advised by these girls who were queuing behind us to select our frames from these magazines (pic 3) while waiting in line, and they recommended taking a photo of the frame codes to type into the photobooth later, this saved us a lot of time as you only get 80s (i think) to select all your frames!! (up to 9 frames depending on the layout you select)

the photobooth itself is a very small space enclosed by only a curtain that could barely cover me and my friend lol 😭 groups of threes could not even get the curtains to close... the process was relatively simple after selecting your layout and frames, you'd be given about 120s (i think) to take your shots and thankfully it allowed us to retake a few shots. HOWEVER, (this might be a glitch but) there was no countdown when my friend and i were taking the pics, so we had to manually press a button on the remote to snap our shots, so i could only pose w one hand 😔

my friend also ran out of time while selecting her frames so we had a few shots without frames 💔 but its fine as we could decorate the pics w stickers before printing them out

for $5 you get ONE print, and i don't think the machine allows u to print 2 of the same print 💔 do note that the machine only accepts NOTES and it has to be exactly $5 as they won't return your change... i only found this out later on, but luckily you can exchange notes with the cashier from their store! even if u didn't have notes, the cashier allowed me to paywave them so don't worry if you're completely cashless! 🤓

once you've taken the pics, you can get the photo sleeves at the decorating area, which also has a paper cutter and more stickers, but unfortunate for us, most of the stickers were used up and had not been restocked 🙁

overall, this is probably my least favourite photobooth experience thus far, mainly due to the lack of structure in the management. despite having a time limit for the frame selection and picture taking, some people took a really long time to decorate their frames 😬 and because there was no time restriction as to how long one could spend in the photobooth, some groups hogged the booth to take multiple rounds for 30 minutes OR MORE 😭 idg how two people can spend THAT much time in a photobooth but ok. So even though my friend and I were second in line, we only got into the booth about 45 minutes later 😐 Personally, I did not enjoy the stuffiness of the studio nor how small the photobooth itself was that even the curtain could not be closed completely, exposing some of the instruction panel in the background of our pictures 💔 the shots came out alright, but u can tell we looked really tired lol

don't get me wrong, i do appreciate the concept of the photobooth which was why I was determined to queue for it in the first place, but I just didn't enjoy the overall experience ☹️ I also understand that the long queues might be attributed to the recent rise in hype and might not be the case everyday, so I do think that yall should give this place a try if you love neoprint, or just try out other booths they had (which had no queue!) as they do have an extensive variety of props you could use and many unique films! the interior of the studio and the shop is super cute too and you could def take some ig worthy shots in there 😚

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