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HP trots out new 3D scanner, #SproutbyHP, at Makeshift Society event

A step forward for at-home 3D scanning gets mixed reviews from event attendees.

Susan and William Brinson, the couple behind the House of Brinson blog, talk about the Sprout 3D scanner. (Photo by Tyler Woods)

As if by magic, William Brinson takes a physical thing and turns it into a digital thing that can be manipulated, moved, and copied in about three seconds.

In this case, it’s lipstick. He cut a piece of lipstick and smeared it on a sheet of white paper. Then he pressed a button and the #SproutbyHP took a three-dimensional photo, which appeared on his screen.

“It’s a crazy thing,” Brinson said. “It’s this new point of really being able to touch and move around your projects. It sounds very rudimentary, but nothing else really does this.”

William and Susan Brinson are a husband-wife duo who do commercial photography and live about an hour-and-a-half up the Hudson. They have a blog, House of Brinson, on which they post some of their photos and explore what it’s like being a wife-and-husband duo out on their own. They were approached by Hewlett-Packard to test out a new piece of technology, the Sprout, and Wednesday night they shared their very positive experience with it at an event in the Brooklyn coworking space, the Makeshift Society. It was sponsored by HP.

Susan said that the best, most useful advancement the Sprout affords her is to essentially prototype and plan shoots before executing. For her lipstick project, which she said was an exploration of feminism and her teenage years, she was able to buy a quarter the amount of the lipstick she would. Since she could scan and replicate rounded images of the lipstick with the Sprout, she could use it as a sketchbook before the actual shoot, playing around with shapes and colors digitally.

Another of the product’s innovations came up at the end of the talk, when Susan and William hooked up via the Sprout with a similar team at the Makeshift Society’s San Francisco office. The Sprout allows two people to work on the same project at the same time and video call while doing it.

One of the roughly 20 people who attended the catered event was Jasmine Trabelsi, a graphic designer who works at the Makeshift Society. She thought HP’s Sprout was a good first try, but that the 250-350 dpi resolution would make it a better fit as a sketchpad than as a professional tool.

“I thought it was good in terms of mocking up something quickly and collaborating,” she said. “The old-school way is to photograph it, scan it in, photoshop it. I think it can reduce a little of that back and forth.”

Others were similarly circumspect.

“I’m struggling to find the real uniqueness of the product besides the scanner on top and the pad on the bottom,” Darren McLeod, a web developer and student at Brooklyn’s Medgar Evers College, said. “We use 3D printers in my apartment and the application we use kind of does the same things. [The Sprout] goes seamlessly into photoshop, though. I do think they have a lot of opportunity of growth.”

Iteration is expected to an extent on any product. If nothing else, the #SproutbyHP allows you to three-dimensionally photocopy your face.

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