I ran a 3D Photo Booth at the 2012 Pittsburgh Mini Maker Faire back in September. While not nearly as cool as the one in the article, we did scan over 90 people over the course of the day and print out over 40 at the fair with two makerbots.

http://jherrman.com/2012/10/introducing-scanbooth/

We couldn't have scanned so many people without some automation for streamlining the scan process and cleaning up the scans for printing. I posted the rails app we used and automation scripts on github:

https://github.com/jherrm/scanbooth

For those unfamiliar with Japanese currency, the Yen isn't subdivided into cents or pence like many Western currencies, so shift the decimal point two places to the left (i.e., think of 100 JPY as $1.00)

For currency conversion just google like this.. "21000 yen to usd", "21000 yen to aud", etc..

It's 264 to 528 USD. Wow.

Pretty cool for weddings: have customized figures of the spouses on the big cake. Since in Japan weddings are extremely expensive (up to several years of savings go into it!) I would not be surprised they start to include this kind of service in the near future.

That's only true to a certain extent.

My wedding cost quite a bit less, although my wife and I decided to do it in Canada and fly over people instead. Many people do a "Hawaii Wedding", fly the guests over, and it costs much less than the marriages ceremonies in Japan. (You talk about industries waiting to be disrupted..)

From what I have heard from friends in Japan, about $20k is on the slightly cheaper side for weddings.

(because of the comparatively lower pay that young professionals receive in the country, this is probably "several years of savings" as ekianjo says)

Wondering how they are printing these. Not aware of a plastic printer that can do that kind of color - are these hand painted afterwards, or come off the machine looking like that?

The maker-bot style, plastic printers are not the only printers out there. For example, I know that the current Z-Corp printers create figures out of a sort of powder and literally use inkjet ink to put the full spectrum of color you would expect right into the surface of the model as it is made (it can get to be a millimeter or so deep, so it doesn't just scratch off). Although you do have to coat it in a lacquer/sealant to strengthen the model post-print. I wonder how the Japanese machine accomplishes this, or if it even needs to?

My experience comes from some work I did for a startup that has such a machine, and uses it for similar purposes (human figures). They've got a decent page showing off their examples: http://www.actionfigurelabs.com/figure-gallery

I'm not sure this concept is very new, last year, Danny Choo made a relatively detailed article[1] about Clone Factory, offering a similar service for about three times the price of the large version.

[1]:http://www.dannychoo.com/post/en/26119/Human+Cloning+in+Japa...

$530 for a 10" statue. Super cool, can't wait for the price to drop.