The Hewlett-Packard Photosmart M527 includes both a six megapixel CCD imager and an HP-branded 3x optical zoom lens. A 7x digital zoom will help you crop in on subjects even more tightly, but like any digital zoom it cannot recreate detail that wasn't in the wide-angle image, and hence will tend to soften images proportionally to the zoom strength. For framing images, there's a 2.0" LCD display - about the average size these days. There's no optical viewfinder - something that's become an increasingly rare in modern digital cameras, unfortunately. Images are stored on Secure Digital / MultiMediaCards, or in 16MB of internal memory.

Images captured on the HP Photosmart M527 are transferred to your computer over a USB 1.1 connection, rather slower than the USB 2.0 High Speed connections offered on most current cameras. The HP M527 is covered by a 90 day warranty, and comes with HP Photosmart Premier software - while an optional camera dock helps emphasise ease of use when transferring images to a computer.