Fax Machine recommendation for Charity

busymum1

Hi

I work for a Charity and as we have small Budget to find the best Fax machine to cope with many incoming n outgoing faxes. Can anyone recommend any we can spend up to £120 but need to have the best as I have volunteered to find the best if its not good everyone will have me. Many Thanks in advance.

At the moment we have Canon B120 so we need something better then this. We need one with bigger papaer tray hold atleast 100 paper and tray our incoming faxes as well.

richt71

Not 'up' on fax machines but just a thought. You can now send and recieve faxes via email for a small fee with services like e-fax.co.uk.

Savvy_Sue

Likewise, not up on current fax machines but I'd say the main thing is to check that the new machine will do what you want. We were regularly sending 15 page faxes, for example, so I made sure that our new one (several years ago now!) could cope with up to 25 pages in the 'outgoing' tray.

I would recommend a laser plain paper rather than one which needs special ribbon rolls etc. Quality vastly improved, AND your ongoing supplies cost will be way lower. I know the laser cartridges will be pricey, BUT our first one lasted over two years, and then we had it refilled at Cartridge World. If you go for the ribbons it will be fiddly and they won't last anything like as long.

Also we use 'scrap' paper for incoming faxes, ie printed on one side already.

Ours is a Richoh btw and we are very happy with it. It's one of the least cursed machines in the office, and I very rarely have to glare at it! :rotfl:

Good luck!

busymum1

Thanks for the response ... I quite like the laser fax machine but can anyone tell me whats the big difference between Inkjet and Laser part from Cartridge cost as laser be more expensive and ofcourse quality i guess but is there anything else i should watch out. Thanks again got the response.

Savvy_Sue

Same as with printers - off the top of my head that would be quality, and no. of pages you can print with each cartridge. We have a colour inkjet printer which I'd say gets used way less than the fax machine, but seems to eat cartridges, and they're not cheap, even to refill.

Suppliers should be able to tell you how many 'average' pages you can do to each cartridge. But if yours is a busy machine then the laser will save time and hassle!

utterbar

busymum1 wrote: »

Thanks for the response ... I quite like the laser fax machine but can anyone tell me whats the big difference between Inkjet and Laser part from Cartridge cost as laser be more expensive and ofcourse quality i guess but is there anything else i should watch out. Thanks again got the response.

Lasers have higher purchase costs but lower running costs - no problems with heads clogging or cartridges drying out, and laser toner cartridges produce thousands of pages whereas inkjet cartridges tend to manage a few hundred at best

bestyman

Could you use a PC as a fax?
Im running vista ultimate that has a built in fax program, I only use it to send the odd fax and it works fine.
Previously I used a program called mighty fax, http://www.rkssoftware.com/mightyfax/overview.html free to try and £10 if you like it

I found this very easy to use. Your Pc will need an old dial up modem ( probably got one built in ) as faxes cannot be sent over broadband.

Im not saying these are suitable for your needs, but they are free to try so worth a look .Also dont use any ink / toners and rather than have bits of paper everywhere all the faxes are stored on your pc. Use your printer you have already to print out any incoming faxes you wish to print . For outgoing docs just type in word doc or similar before faxing. To fax documents such as pictures these will need scanning in.

busymum1

hi

If its only me who is going to use fax then i would go for fax from pc but as we have team of 15 people its not possible as they will not be comfortable using it. I have got list of fax machine which i will go through next week as my budget is £125 the most. Many thanks once again for your help.

oldtoolie

Another possibility is a combo fax, copier, laser printer. We have a £50 @ month contract with a local photocopier firm that provides the machine, service, toner and 2500 copies per month.

Check the duty cycle. You need one that will handle the volume of work.
Check the cost per page -- lasers are cheaper.

When I buy something like this I try to compare the total cost over 1 year including consumables rather than initial purchase price.

Savvy_Sue

oldtoolie wrote: »

Another possibility is a combo fax, copier, laser printer. We have a £50 @ month contract with a local photocopier firm that provides the machine, service, toner and 2500 copies per month.

Check the duty cycle. You need one that will handle the volume of work.
Check the cost per page -- lasers are cheaper.

When I buy something like this I try to compare the total cost over 1 year including consumables rather than initial purchase price.

That's all very good advice from Larry, as ever, but my only worry about going for 'all-in-one' machines is that if that one machine goes down, you're stuffed. Oh, and the other disadvantage is that they are, like half the human race, only capable of doing one thing at a time. So if you have an urgent fax to send and a colleague is in the middle of a large copy run, you either have to wait, or work out how to pause the copy run. And if a fax comes in when someone's in the middle of a long copy run, will it get lost in the heap? Only you know whether your colleagues will cope with things like that.

We have a laser printer !!! photocopier which is our 'main' machine, it could fax as well but I'm often very glad we didn't choose that option because at times it has been a complete pain in the behind, out of order more than it's been working. We have a separate fax machine, which can do simple copying and that's saved our bacon once or twice given the situation with the main printer. We now also have two colour inkjet printers / scanners which can do occasional copies if we're really stuck, and yes we did once have both the fax and the laser printer not working for a day. At which point we started scanning documents and emailing them as attachments.

I guess my summary is that if it's mission critical, always have a backup plan. :rotfl: