The Photosmart 6520 connects via USB or Wi-Fi and has media-card slots for MMC, MS, and SD cards. It comes with an 80-sheet, bottom-mounted, slide-out main input tray. Duplexing is automatic for prints and copies from this tray. The tray takes both letter- and legal-size media. Piggybacked onto the main tray is a 20-sheet feeder for 4-by-6-inch or 5-by-7-inch photo paper. Up to 20 printed or copied pages may come to rest on the lid over these trays. A fairly flimsy extension pivots and flips out from the lid to finish the output area.

HP's new style of documentation is heavy on pictures and animations, and sometimes lacking in useful details such as paper capacities. And though legal-size media isn't commonly used, I was surprised that HP would support it but not tell you how to load it. (Hint: Flip down the front panel of the tray; the sheets will hang out the front a bit.)

Above the printer sits the scanner, which has basic specs: a letter/A4-size platen, a lid that doesn't telescope to accommodate thicker materials, and no automatic document feeder for scanning multipage documents. (In this price range, look for an ADF on small-office models such as the . A thicker lid beneath the slender scanner lid provides access to the ink cartridges and to the internal paper path.

A 3.45-inch color touchscreen and peripheral controls that light when needed dominate the easy-to-use control panel. I especially liked being able to preview a scan on the screen. Note that the touchscreen requires slight pressure to register a touch--a bit surprising at first, if you're used to more-sensitive touchscreens, but not difficult to adjust to.

The Photosmart 6520's print, copy, and scan speeds hover above and below the average. Text and monochrome graphics exit at a peppy 8.5 pages per minute on the PC and 8 ppm on the Mac. The printing speed for snapshot-size photo prints is about 3 ppm on plain paper at default settings (a little faster than average) or just of 1 ppm on glossy photo paper (slightly below average). Single-page copies come out slightly slower than average at 2.9 ppm. Full-page photos printed on the Mac arrive at about 0.4 ppm--slightly slower than average.