I've got offers of donation of a G4 tower and an iSight camera, so the photo booth seems to be coming together rather painlessly. The one remaining question is whether to have it make prints in addition to posting them online. Prints would be cool, of course, but it's more stuff that will break, not to mention, ink isn't cheap.

So my questions for you, dear Lazyweb:

• What's a cheap, fast printer that I could use for this? Assume I want to print a strip of 4 small photos, say 2"×1.5", on either 2"×6" (preferable) or 4"x3" paper. Cost-per-print and printing speed are more important than quality.

• Assuming I can't keep the cost of the ink low enough for it to be practical to do this for free, I guess I could try to make a bill reader work... There seem to be a few USB bill readers out there. Do any of you have experience with them?

I wrote the software for it the other night; give it a try if you are so moved. (MacOS 10.4 or newer.) It shows a live video preview, and when you click the mouse, it takes four pictures, with a 3 second countdown before each; then it briefly shows all four pictures, and goes back to idle.

Though I'm not sure whether that's obvious enough behavior; it'll probably need signage or on-screen text.

Suggestions for a better countdown animation? I like the look of the classic "Universal Film Leader" countdown, but those never have a "1" (they only count down to "2", then go black).