The Officejet 6600 is a good performer. In our tests, monochrome pages printed at 10 pages per minute on the PC and 9.6 ppm on the Mac. Snapshot-size (4-by-6-inch) photos printed to plain paper at 3.4 ppm and to glossy paper at about 1 ppm. Full page photos printed at 0.4 ppm, and copies exited quickly at 5.1 ppm.

As for consumables, the Officejet 6600 uses a four-cartridge ink system (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) that's basically average in cost with the regular-capacity supplies, but cheaper than most printers in this class when using the high-capacity cartridges. The regular, $20 black cartridge lasts for 400 pages, for a slightly below-average cost of 5 cents per page. The $11 cyan, magenta, and yellow cartridges each last for 330 pages, working out to 3.3 cents per page, per color. Add all of that up, and you get a slightly pricey 15 cents for a four-color page. The $32 XL black, on the other hand, lasts for 1000 pages (3.2 cents per page), and the $16 XL color cartridges each last for 825 pages (1.9 cents per page, per color). Nine cents for a four-color page is quite inexpensive. The unit ships with starter-size cartridges, which are the regular-size cartridges with some extra ink slated for use during the initialization process.

Despite good performance and cheap high-capacity supplies, a $150 multifunction without any sort of duplexing support should be avoided (unless you actually want to double your paper usage, mailing costs, storage space, and such). Instead, choose a like-priced competitor, such as the or the .