In current times, when one decides to purchase a fax machine for his office, he has lots of choices. There are many models and many variants available in the market. Some models are from market leaders like Canon and Panasonic to some from unknown companies.
There are some variants that are basic fax machines with a flatbed scanner while there are some machines that serve as machines doing four functions that are Printing, Copying, Scanning and faxing. With so many choices available user is left with a question of what to buy and what suits better to his needs. Here, we shall discuss what should one take into consideration before making a buying decision.
The first basic thing that needs to be checked is a type of paper input.
Older fax machines used to be fed with thermal paper compared to plain papers now a day. Thermal paper has three disadvantages:
- They are much more costly compared to plain paper.
- Printing on thermal paper fades away after some days, hence if fax material has to be stored for a long time; it has to be copied on plain paper.
- You will have to keep stock of thermal papers raising your inventory cost.
The second important aspect to look while purchasing is transmission speed.
While you can get some really cheap fax machines but if you have high fax usage then faxing can eat up lots of your time. Hence planned usage of the machine should be a deciding factor for buying it. Usually, an office that expects to send 10-15 papers a day should opt for a fax with 14000 bits per second (bps) speed compared to a fax machine with 9600bps.
With a higher-end machine, you can save 50% of the time. In addition to time, you tend to save on telephone bill also.
Consider the memory size of the fax machine.
This is essential to save data in case fax answer machine does not have enough papers available in the tray. The number of papers that can be put in tray should also be checked.
This is necessary as you can get many inward faxes on weekends and need to put a higher number of papers in reserve.
Some additional functions like speakerphone number memory shortcuts and compatibility with internet faxing should also be checked. In case there would many people using the machine and you do not have dedicated person for doing faxing duties then simplicity and sturdiness of the machine become important.
There would be many features available but you should only go for that are actually needed.
