Test mode lets you walk a booth through an entire guest session with nothing plugged in. No camera, no printer, no card reader. It is genuinely useful while you are building a booth, and it is the single most expensive thing to forget to switch off.
A booth still in test mode looks completely normal. It takes photos, it shows the strip, it approves payments. It just does all of it with pretend hardware, which at a real event means a test card instead of your guests, nothing coming out of the printer, and every session approved without taking a cent.
How to tell in five seconds
Open the booth and look for a TEST MODE badge on screen. If it is there, the booth is pretending. Inside Studio, the Home page and the Testing page both say so plainly in an orange banner.
Turning it off
In Studio, under System, choose Testing, then clear Enable test mode on this machine.
Worth knowing: this setting belongs to the computer, not to the booth profile. It does not travel when you export a profile and load it on another machine. That is deliberate, but it means checking every computer rather than assuming the setting came along.
The three stand-ins, and what each one hides
- Stand-in camera. The booth draws a moving test image instead of using your camera. It moves on purpose, because a frozen test card would make a dead camera look like a working one.
- Stand-in printer. The booth builds the sheet exactly as the real printer would, waits a couple of seconds like a dye-sub printer does, and then does not print. It can save what it would have printed to a folder, which is useful for checking a design without burning paper.
- Stand-in payment. Every session is approved after a short pause, with no card and no charge.
You can also deliberately simulate a disconnected camera or a printer out of paper. Both are worth doing once before your first paid event, so you find out what a guest sees when something fails while you are standing next to the booth rather than when you are an hour away.
Your before-the-event check
Work down the Home page in Studio. It checks camera, printer, internet, license, screens, print designs, session, delivery, cloud and payment, and tells you which ones will bite.
- Test mode off, and no TEST MODE badge in the booth.
- Camera green, and the picture you see in the booth is your actual camera.
- Printer green, with a test sheet you have actually looked at.
- Payment reader set to your real hardware rather than Mock, if the booth charges.
- Delivery channels showing Ready, not Needs setting up.
- License not about to expire. It shows the days remaining right in the sidebar.
- Enough paper for the day, and the roll count reset if you loaded a fresh one.
Common questions
Can I leave test mode on for a demo at a venue?
Yes, and it is a good use of it. You can show a prospect the whole guest experience on a laptop with no camera or printer in the room. Just make sure the booth you actually install is a different machine, or that you switch it off before install day.
The booth prints nothing and shows no error.
Check test mode first. A stand-in printer accepts the job and quietly discards it, which looks exactly like a printer problem and is not one.