In a Nutshell:

This chair looks like it should be fantastic, but despite being feature rich, falls short of greatness. Ogawa Touch 3D Massage Chair is recommended for mostly hobbyist users, though if you have chronic lower back pain, it will provide solid therapeutic benefits.

Overall Massage Quality
Customization options
Ease of Use
Value for the Money

Overall Rating

4.4/5

Benefits

  • Incredible feature set, Lots of options for hobbyists
  • Solid therapeutic benefits including lumbar heat, body stretching
  • Incredible air massage
  • Excellent calf and foot massage

Drawbacks

  • Substandard dual rollers
  • Large footprint
  • Limited mass market appeal due to above factors

Are you looking for something a little different? A little out of the ordinary? Do you know you want a massage chair, but you don’t want one that’s alike everyone else has? If you answered yes to any of those questions, then you’ll be very interested in our Ogawa Touch 3D massage chair review.

This is an unusual chair on many levels. It’s packed with features you’ll love, but it also has a couple of glaring flaws that leave us scratching our heads. The combination of those things makes this chair very much a niche product. It’s not for everyone, but for the right user, it’s just about perfect.

Are you that user? Quite possibly! We’ll go over everything this model can do, and let you know about the shortcomings we found, so you have all the information you need to decide if it’s a good fit for you and your family. Let’s take a look under the hood to see what this chair can do!

An Overview of the Ogawa Touch 3d Massage Chair

Aesthetics

While some massage chair models take pains to hide their true nature (mostly by tucking the leg massage ports up under the chair frame when they’re not in use). This isn’t one of those models. It’s obvious what this chair is, and what it’s for. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that, it’s not likely to blend seamlessly with the décor of whatever room you’ve got it sitting in.

An image of Ogawa Touch 3D in Black and Cappuccino color

It’s also a sizeable piece of furniture, measuring 55.1” x 34.6” x 49.2.” In addition to that, it’s not built with space-saving technology and requires a staggering 31.5” between the chair back and the wall you set it near, so it’s going to fill up a room. If you don’t have much space, it may be tough to find the chair a permanent home.

The upside is that the chair is a good fit for bigger, taller people. It will support users up to 6’5” in height and has a weight capacity of up to 260 pounds.

It’s not a bad looking design by any means, but given the above, it’s not for everyone.

The Roller-Based Massage Experience

So let’s talk about massage. That is, after all, the main reason you’re buying a massage chair, right

Here, you’ll find a lot to like, and one major disappointment.

Let’s start with the good aspects: For starters, the chair utilizes 3D roller technology, which allows the rollers to move out and away from the massage track, rendering a deeper and more therapeutic massage.

An image of Ogawa Touch 3D in Zero Gravity position

It also comes with not one, but two Zero-G seating positions. Zero-G is a fantastic feature that greatly enhances the overall massage experience. By positioning your body such that your knees are slightly above your heart, it leaves you with a genuine feeling of weightlessness that’s both comfortable and incredibly relaxing.

It also uses the force of gravity to press you more firmly into the seat back, which allows the rollers to render and even deeper and more penetrating massage, giving it tremendous synergy with the 3D roller tech. Even better, the chair is also equipped with soft blue LED lights (Chromotherapy) that many users say helps them relax more completely.

Another thing that enhances the overall massage experience is the excellent Body Scanning technology that the Touch 3D utilizes. It actually takes two scans of your back, every time you sit in the chair, averaging the results to better zero in on your pressure points, making subtle adjustments to the position of the rollers as needed.

The tech rarely gets it wrong, but if it does, there are options on the touchscreen tablet (which we’ll talk about in a later section) that allow you to tweak the roller positions to taste.

Now for the not so good.

An illustrative image of Ogawa Touch massage chair dual 3D rollers

The Touch 3D has a relatively short massage track (S-Track). That may not be a bad thing, depending on what your needs are, but if you’re looking for something that’s capable of rendering a glute massage, or tending to the backs of your thighs, this one’s not for you. (Note that the chair does offer a seat vibration massage, so it does offer something on that front, but a simple vibration massage is a far cry from what you’d get from an L-Track).

The biggest failing, in our view, is the fact that the Touch 3D utilizes dual rollers. Quad rollers are the current industry standard, and we’re absolutely mystified why they weren’t incorporated into this design. The result is that while the basic massage experience is good, it’s not world-class, and given the price of the machine, it should be.

An Impressive Number of Options

There’s a lot to like here, and the number of options the Touch 3D has on offer almost makes up for the failure to include quad rollers. There are a staggering number of techniques on offer, including:

A frontal image of Ogawa Touch 3D massage chair in Black and Cappuccino color
  • Compression
  • Kneading
  • Tapping
  • Clapping
  • Rolling
  • Tractioning
  • Tapotement
  • Stroking
  • Rocking

There are also four advanced techniques on offer:

  • Balinese
  • Swedish
  • Japanese
  • Shiatsu

That’s far and away more than most chairs on the market today offer.

It gets better though. In addition to that, you’ll find five different roller speed settings and six different intensity settings, with the highest of these delivering an exceptional deep tissue massage.

Spot and partial massage options are also available, allowing you to focus the rollers exactly where you need them. If that wasn’t enough, you can also adjust the duration of any massage to a maximum of thirty minutes. In addition to that, you’ll find eight fantastic pre-programmed massage options. These are:

  • Demo
  • Gentle
  • Vigorous
  • Relax
  • Therapy
  • Thai
  • Swedish
  • Japanese

An Exceptional Air Massage

If the roller-based massage left us a bit wanting on account of the dual rollers, the air massage goes a long way toward making up for it.

The Touch 3D features an impressive 64 Second-Generation airbags and is capable of rendering an excellent body massage, adjustable through five different levels of intensity. The chair also offers a very aggressive Thai body stretch, which has tremendous therapeutic value, especially for people who suffer from chronic lower back pain.

You can either opt for a full body massage, or activate the airbags zone by zone, enjoying an arm and hand massage, hip, and leg massage, or calf and foot massage, at your preference.

An illustrative image of Ogawa Touch 3D lumbar heat

Lumbar Heat

This is another powerful therapeutic benefit, quite helpful to those who suffer from chronic lower back pain. The offered heat, especially when combined with a deep tissue massage (maximum roller intensity), body stretching and one of the Zero-G seating positions is simply magnificent.

Given the price of the chair though, we were hoping to see more extensive heat. Adding it to the footwells would have created another powerful therapeutic benefit, and the ability to control the temperature would have been a nice finishing touch. Alas, neither of those options are present.

Calf & Foot Massage

The Touch 3D’s calf and foot massage is, in our view, better than the one offered by the company’s flagship model, thanks to the presence of rollers in the bottom of the footwell. The Smart 3D (Ogawa’s flagship model) renders its calf and foot massage via airbags only, so this is a step up.

The addition of heat would obviously make it better, but the bottom line is that if you have a job that sees you on your feet for much of the day, then this is likely to be your favorite aspect of the chair.

An Entertainment Suite!

The Touch 3D is equipped with Bluetooth speakers and a USB charging port, allowing you to listen to your favorite tunes via your smartphone if you want, but you don’t have to!

An image of Ogawa Touch 3D touch-screen tablet.

While most massage chairs come with a remote, the Touch 3D (and indeed, most of the chairs Ogawa sells) comes with a full-sized touch-screen tablet, so you can simply listen to your music from that. Or watch movies, play games, or surf the web while enjoying your massage.

In addition to that, the Ogawa app is exceptionally well designed and intuitive, allowing you to easily control every aspect of the chair’s operation.

There’s also a diagnostic section in the app that will step you through the process of solving many of the most common types of problems you might encounter when using the chair. Of course, if you run into something you can’t fix on your own, or that the app doesn’t cover, help is just a phone call away, and Ogawa has exceptional post-sales service and support, so you’ll always feel like you’re in good hands.

A Bit of a Learning Curve

Given the sheer number of features on offer, it should come as no surprise that there is a bit of a learning curve involved in mastering the chair’s use. If you’re not especially tech-savvy, then the presence of the app and tablet versus a traditional remote will extend the learning curve a bit, but again, the app is incredibly well designed, so it’s not as daunting as it might first appear.

In any case, you can still be enjoying your first massage in a matter of minutes, thanks to the pre-programmed massage options, though expect to spend an hour or so exploring everything the Touch 3D can do (and slightly longer than that if you’re not tech savvy).

Ogawa Touch 3D Massage Chair Pros & Cons

So where does that leave us?

Unquestionably, there’s a lot to like about the Touch 3D. It’s got an incredible feature set, lots for hobbyists to enjoy, and solid therapeutic benefits for those who suffer from chronic lower back pain.

In our view, the strongest features of the design are:

  • The incredible number of options
  • An impressive collection of therapeutic benefits, including lumbar heat, excellent body stretching and deep tissue massage
  • An incredible air massage
  • plusAn excellent calf and foot massage
An image of Ogawa Touch 3D highlighting airbags placements

On the other hand, though, it pairs all that with substandard dual rollers and a large footprint, both of which limit its mass market appeal. The two biggest changes we’d like to see are the inclusion of quad rollers (our biggest complaint) and space-saving technology, which would make it easier for people with smaller living spaces to find a home for it.

Final Thoughts on Ogawa Touch 3D Review

And that wraps up our in-depth Ogawa Touch 3D massage chair review. At the end of the day, you can judge a massage chair’s overall quality by its warranty, as that’s a direct expression of how much faith the company has in the product they’re selling.

Ogawa’s warranty is five years, which is far above the industry standard. There’s a good reason for that. It’s an exceptional chair, and incredibly well made.

Overall, the Touch 3D has more strong points than weaknesses, but its major weakness (dual rollers) is a glaring one, especially given that the primary function of a massage chair is to render a great massage, and rollers play a critical role in that. At the very least, we would have expected industry standard quad rollers, and possibly more, given the model’s list price.

On that basis, we recommend it for hobbyist and general users, and for those who suffer from chronic back pain, but our recommendation is provisional. Given the price of the chair, you can find comparably priced models that offer a better roller-based massage experience and a longer massage track.

It’s by no means a bad design; it’s just that there are better values for the money out there, and we feel that our final score for this model reflects that.


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