I needed to buy a piece of office equipment last week. It was something basic that I needed, but just never got around to getting one. The item in question was a copier. Oh, I had the capability to do limited copying, but I had to do it by scanning each individual sheet in my flatbed scanner, and then using copy software to copy the image to my laser printer. It worked OK, but as you can imagine it was a bit tedious on longer documents!
I looked at the PC multifunction printer market. These printers have fax capability, combined with scanning and copying. There are some units that are quite inexpensive, often around $150 or less. Of course you could pay more for a more elaborate unit. But the issue for me was that I didn't want an inkjet copier - you really pay a lot for those little black ink cartridges; laser printers and copiers are much more cost effective, not to mention faster. This assumes, of course, that you don't have a requirement for color faxing or copying.
Also, I only needed limited fax capability. I never receive faxes via the phone any more. I subscribe to a service called FaxWave (www.faxwave.com) that works really well. They give you a phone number (a 910 local number) which is yours exclusively. Whenever anyone tries to send a fax to that number it beeps and boops just like a normal fax machine, but it sends the fax image to me as a PDF file in an email attachment. The great advantage of this is that I don't have to actually print the fax if I don't want to - I can just view it. Also, I can file the email (or save the attachment) on my hard drive if I wish. I think it is a great product for the price, about $8/month.
I do send faxes, but I use the modem and software on my PC to do this. The problem here was that I had to again scan each page I wanted to send individually using my flatbed scanner.
I went around to the two big electronics stores in Wilmington and didn't find much. The only laser multifunction unit I could find was $500, and quite big. I next went to OfficeMax and was pleasantly surprised. They had a lot of units to show me, and the salesperson there actually, really knew her stuff! She listened to my requirements, and then suggested a Brother unit (DCP 7020) that was just a copier and document scanner - it had no built-in fax capability. But that fit my bill perfectly. It has a fairly high speed scanner with both flatbed and page feeder, and a laser printer. The price was about $200.
But the important thing to me (besides normal copying) is that it would scan multi-page documents from the document feeder and create a single, multi-page PDF document (color or B&W) on my PC. Now, all I had to do to fax a document is to scan it into a PDF file, bring up the PDF viewer to view it, and print to my fax software. I replaced my current laser printer with the Brother unit (not much larger) and I am now a happy camper - or it is copier?
The only disadvantage of the unit is that it has a USB 1.1 interface, not USB 2.0. This was a bit disappointing, as it can make scans a bit slower. But if the scan speed is limited by the physical speed of the scanner, this is not an issue and perhaps why Brother did this.
This got me to thinking about fax in general. The era of faxing seems to be over, after almost a century. Faxes are generally only black and white and fairly low resolution. Any of the times that I had to receive a fax, print it, sign it, and re-fax it back the results were pretty terrible looking. Most businesses I know of these days are moving to using PDF files exchanged in email. The advantages of this approach are a) much better quality, b) both B&W and color, c) much faster, and d) PDF files can be constructed to allow you to modify them directly on the PC screen rather than have to print them out.
So, the days of faxes are soon to be over, and the bright people at Brother have developed a unit for the future, not the past.
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport - Oak Island area. You can visit his Website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail questions or column ideas to him at bsc@bobseidel.com. For specific inquiries, please call Bob Seidel Consulting, LLC at 278-1007.)