Fax machines have evolved since 1843 but came into their own in 1966 when Xerox introduced the Magnafax Telecopier, a smaller and more user-friendly model which could be connected to a telephone line.
While it took about 6 minutes to transmit a document, a snail’s pace compared to today’s speeds, it represented a major leap in fax machine technology. In the 1970’s the Japanese took an interest in fax machines and the rest is history.
Why fax machines are preferable to Internet faxing
Even in the age of email, there are still a lot of people who prefer the simplicity of sending a fax. Not everyone has a computer, broadband or trusts the Internet and it is reassuring to know your document is printed out in the recipient’s office ready for action within seconds of being sent.
The sender can print a report proving the transmission was received, with line number, date and time, whereas email reports only that a message was sent. The email sender has no control over when the email will be received and read, or worse if it will get lost in the ether or junked by a hostile spam filter.
Handwritten or signed documents are much easier to fax than to scan and email. Several pages of a document can be fed into a fax machine and transmitted in seconds. Compare that to the tedious process of scanning each page individually then saving to your computer with a filename before attaching to an email. I’m asleep already!
What you receive from the multifunction fax machines is a printed document you can read and process straight away. Unlike an email attachment which can be opened only by the right software, which you may or may not have, or if you do, you may not have the right version.
By the time you actually get to open your document, the sender, who has since had a three-course lunch followed by several rounds of golf, is already chasing your response. Not too efficient! You’re probably going to have to print the document too.
How time-consuming when you could have simply ripped the pages from a fax machine.
New technology isn’t always best!
Stand-alone fax machines – why they remain popular
Stand-alone fax machines can still fulfil an important role for those whose time is money and who want a fast efficient and reliable method of transferring documents between two individuals. The information is transferred almost instantly. No need to wait for the boss’s secretary to finish her filing before retrieving her emails, reading them all, finding your document, opening it, choosing the settings and printing it out.
How much more satisfying to see the document emerging from the fax machine within seconds of being sent. Remember all those films where the killer’s face is being printed out by a fax machine line by line just in time for the hero to catch him red-handed? If the picture was sent by email, he would probably have committed three more murders by the time it was discovered amongst ads for penis enlargement!
Stand-alone fax machines UK are simple to use, cheap to operate and legally compliant. Having a single function they are reliable, long lasting and cheap to buy. Quite simply – they do what it says on the tin!
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