Reliable office fax machine?

[ericnguyen]

Dear friends,

Please recommend some good and RELIABLE home office fax machines (inkjet or laser). Thanks.

Best regards,

Eric

It depends on the amount of work it does. I have had Brothers for several problem free years. The same goes for Panasonic.

[Palangi]

The stand-alone fax business is dying right now as most of that imaging has moved to E-mail. The quality of fax machines across the entire spectrum has turned to poope. I despise inkjet technology because of the high cost per page and low reliability. This is particularly a factor in low volume fax applications as the ink cartridges will dry out and go bad from not being used enough, then when you need to recieve a fax, surprise, the cartridge is bad.

For very low volume stand-alone fax (like less than 100 pages per month), get something other than inkjet. Sharp makes low volume fax machines with a transfer roll that seems to work OK. Cost per page is similar to inkjet but much better reliability. Other manufacturers probably have similar technology. For higher volume you might want to consider a multifunction device (fax/scanner/printer/etc). Again, most of what's on the market will be inkjunk, but HP has some models with laser print engine that are not unreasonably priced. The drawback with the multifunction devices, of course, is that they are tied to a computer. The advantage of the laser print engine is that the per page cost will be less.

For anything over about 250 pages per month, you need a stand-alone laser fax. That part of the market is treacherous as the cost of the hardware is high and the quality is poor.

Hope this helps.

[Flash Gordon]

We use the Brother laser fax for serveral years now without any issues.

I personally use a Brother intellifax 1270 I lug it into temporary offices and it spend a major portion of it's life in the back of my truck, all of the plastic is cracked but it still works. If you buy the thermal rolls on ebay it's pretty cheap.

[phatryd]

I've had a Ricoh laser fax (4700L) that I picked up used on E-Bay a few years ago. The thing is indestructible -- I routinely send and receive 30-50 page faxes and it never misfeeds, etc. I think the machine was about $3K new and I got it for ~$500. The newer ones (4800L etc.) have a faster modem which saves a bit on long-distance charges.

John

[Palangi]

Generally speaking the 5 year old models are significantly better quality than the current ones. The older one was probably made in Japan and whereas the current models are made in various slave labor countries. If you have an old model that is working well for you, try to stock up on supplies for it. The life cycle of the supplies is getting to be shorter than it used to be.

[phatryd]

Thanks, Palangi. I haven't had any trouble getting supplies for it so far -- a dealer is close to me -- but your point is well taken and I probably should stock up at some point just in case.

Best,

John