Fax Finding

What to look for in a facsimile machine

Quick, easy, and relatively cheap, facsimile is probably the fastest-growing form of mail today. Like some electronic mail between computers, facsimiles travel over phone lines, but unlike computer electronic mail, the process is far from paperless. It's rather like using a remote photocopying machine: a paper original is fed into a facsimile machine at one location, and a copy appears nearly instantaneously at a facsimile machine somewhere else. With facsimile, you are sending pictures of pages by telephone.

It's not surprising, then, that facsimile, or fax, has grown most quickly in Japan, where business messages are still handwritten. Indeed, most of the world's fax machines are installed in Japan, and nearly all of them are made there. In the United States today, roughly one in 10 offices has a fax machine, and in three years, about half of all businesses will. So for all practical purposes, if you're in business, you need fax.

An ordinary fax machine is a self-contained unit comprising a scanner to "read" the paper originals, a modem to transmit and receive images, and a printer to print them. The sending machine scans the original page and breaks what it "sees" into dots called picture elements (pixels), which are then converted into audio signals that travel over the phone line. The receiving machine re-creates and prints the image on paper, dot by dot. No computer is involved, although computers can also generate and receive facsimiles.

Compared with other forms of mail, fax has several advantages. Unlike regular or overnight mail, facsimiles -- complete with text and graphics -- arrive immediately, and unless you are sending more than 50 pages, you'll pay less than the price of overnight delivery. A 2-page facsimile sent across the country is cheaper than 2 pages transmitted over most public electronic-mail services; if sent during the night when phone rates are lowest, it is even cheaper than first-class mail. But perhaps most important, facsimile, unlike electronic mail, is universal. Virtually every fax machine can talk to every other fax machine; all you need is the receiving machine's phone number.

All modern fax machines follow what is known as the Group 3 fax protocol, set by international agreement. This protocol defines two page-image resolutions: "standard," which has 200 dots per inch (DPI) horizontally and 100 DPI vertically, and "fine," with 200 DPI in both directions. At these resolutions, a page is legible but hardly attractive. Straight lines in the original come out a little jagged at the receiving end, and artifacts in the scanning process scatter stray dots on the copy. Reading text from a facsimile is a little like reading it under water.

The quality of fax images is better with Group 4 protocol, which offers resolutions of up to 400 DPI vertically and horizontally. But Group 4 requires a digital phone line, a rarity today, so few of us will see its benefits until the next decade.

Fax features
Fax machines from the major Japanese manufacturers are nearly all well made and reliable, and within a given price and feature range, they are pretty much equivalent. Even the cheapest fully functional fax machine on the U.S. market, the Murata M-1200 (about $900 list), does the basics -- scan, send, receive, and print -- as well as any fax machine; it simply lacks any extras.

Some of these extras make it easier to send and receive facsimiles on your machine; their usefulness is independent of the features on the fax machines that you communicate with. Such conveniences include document feeders, which can take a small stack of original pages and automatically feed them through your fax machine one at a time, and paper cutters, which cut up received facsimiles into pages (most fax machines print on a continuous roll of paper). If you frequently need to send photographs or other artwork by fax, choose a machine with a scanner that can process grays. Some machines offer a single-document "broadcast" function that lets you send the same document to two or more fax machines in a single operation. An autodialer lets you store frequently called fax numbers for quick retrieval.

Other features work only if both sending and receiving fax machines share them. Polling, in which one fax machine can ask another to send back a document, is one of these. With this feature, a fax machine in the home office can poll fax machines in branch offices, requesting a document that has been loaded, ready for transmission; the central-office fax machine could pull in all the daily sales reports, for example. Another feature in this category is error correction, which ensures that an incoming image is received without glitches. To do this, the receiving fax machine calculates a number based on the pattern of incoming pixels and compares the result with an independent calculation made by the sending machine; if there is a discrepancy, the pixels are sent again.

A third type of feature works only if sending and receiving machines are made by the same manufacturer. These are mainly useful for intracompany fax, in which case all the machines are likely to be the same. This category includes superfine mode (200 DPI horizontally by 400 DPI vertically), Brother's two-color fax, special data-compression schemes that shorten transmission time, and password protection. With the latter, only someone with a password can print a sensitive document; anyone can read an unprotected message as it is printed out.

One major nuisance shared by virtually all fax machines priced at less than $3,000 is the flimsy thermal paper they use. This thin, smooth paper is hard to write on and will discolor or fade if exposed to strong light or some kinds of plastics and organic solvents; it can be stored for many years in paper file folders, however. Many people immediately photocopy any fax they receive and discard the original, thus consuming even more paper. Some fax machines priced at $4,000 and more print by a thermal-transfer process on a heavier, smooth paper. The paper and ribbons for such machines are expensive -- about 15¢ a page, compared with 2¢ or 3¢ a page for thermal paper. Xerox has a more flexible thermal-transfer printer that can print on some plain papers. If you want to print on a wider range of ordinary papers, however, you will need a fax machine with a laser printer -- but these cost more than $5,000.

For the best survey of fax machines on the market now, see the fax issue of What to Buy for Business, which contains a comparison chart and picks best buys within several price ranges. It also lists models that are sold under more than one brand name, which helps to identify the overpriced units. Avoid the many expensive guides to fax machines that merely list features extracted from the manufacturers' promotional literature.

Some models should be avoided altogether. Avoid slow fax machines that take 40 seconds or more to send a typical page (that is, machines with a maximum speed of less than 9,600 bits per second). You should also avoid "memo fax" machines, recently launched as low-cost products in Japan. These machines process only paper that is 4¼ inches wide by 5½ inches; their inability to handle standard letter or legal sheets makes them useless for business. And don't be taken in by ads touting fax machines as convenience copiers. To be sure, a fax machine can be made to work as a copying machine if it scans a page and prints it immediately, but any conventional copying machine gives you much better quality.