The HP Photosmart Premium Fax All-in-One does have an automatic document feeder, so if you have several pages to scan, you'll appreciate this feature. At high quality, a scan takes about 12 minutes to complete. If you're using the ScanPro software, you're limited in file size - I was only able to scan an 8x10 image at 200 dpi. Using the TWAIN driver gets around this issue though and lets you scan at the full hardware resolution of the printer.

I scanned the same image with both programs, using the same image settings - 200 dpi, 8-bit color. The results were very interesting - neither program generated a particularly accurate scan in color tone (See Figures 4 and 5), although the TWAIN driver was significantly more accurate in color balance with lighter tones. The ScanPro software was much darker in overall tone and exhibited significant noise in the scan that required a fair amount of cleaning up in Photoshop after the scan. Overall, the HP Photosmart Premium Fax All-in-One did a good job with scanning - it's not up to the standards of a dedicated scanner, but for the odd job, it'll do fine.

Figure 4

Figure 5

Printing

The primary reason you'll be looking at one of these devices though is most likely the printing. The HP Photosmart Premium Fax All-in-One includes automatic duplex printing, making it easy to print on both sides of the page, and is reasonably fast at printing normal documents. The key though is photo printing and the quality level generated. And, in this area, the printers did a very good job. I ran both glossy and luster photo papers through with a series of test images that include hard to reproduce colors like red and blue, as well as grayscale tones to check for neutrality in the prints.

The HP Photosmart Premium Fax All-in-One is designed for printing on normal weight papers. There are two paper trays for the printer - a full size tray that can hold regular paper or photo paper, and a dedicated 5x7 tray for photo papers in 3.5x5, 4x6, or 5x7 sizes. Both trays can be left loaded, and the printer will select automatically based on the paper size chosen in the print driver.

HP includes profiles for their Advanced and Premium photo papers. You'll have much better results with the Advanced paper than the Premium papers, which I found to have a strong color shift and general lack of detail.  I asked several people to look at the images and all found them pleasing to the eye with accurate colors. Personally, I felt the prints were a bit saturated, but that is what most people prefer (don't believe me? Take a look at a JPEG image straight out of the camera).

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