All in one printers / scanners / fax / copier machines

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Proto

Legendary Member
At work office, currently using an ancient but brilliant HP Laserjet 6P printer and a very tired Brother MFC9060 Fax/Copier. The Brother needs a new cartridge and is becoming unreliable in paper feeding. So I'm thinking of dumping both of them and getting a combined unit to replace both.

We only receive about 6 faxes a day, very few of them junk.
Printer demands are smallish too, printing maybe 20 pages maximum per day, (except month/year end reports).
Reasonable quality copying facility a must.
Scanner a rare requirement, and fall back is I use the one next door and email myself the scan.

So, a couple of questions.

1) How successful is sending and receiving fax straight to the PC? Any software recommendations or just use what comes with the hardware?

2) Any preferred brands, models? Not too bothered about price, would rather select on basis of quality.

3) Anything else I need to know?
 

swee'pea99

Legendary Member
You use faxes? Do you have a wireless too?

Seriously though, I'm sceptical about these all in one jobbies....they're complicated, which means plenty to go wrong, and of course if one bit goes, you've lost everything. If I were you, I'd keep your printer, get a new (old) fax and scanner off ebay. I'd recommend Canon LIDE scanners - they make excellent 'one touch' photocopies too. Better yet, setup your pooter to receive the faxes, then you can print them off on your old but reliable printer.

(All in one jobbies also cost a fortune in inks, tho' admittedly it sounds like that wouldn't be too much of a problem for you, given your low rates of usage.)
 
I use a Brother MFC-440CN, does all those things you want and probably at a similiar volume. I buy Ink-Rite inks off e-bay but the Brother is fairly economic. It will scan and copy multiple pages and is a one touch on the printer or customisable from the desktop software, USB or networkable.

HP or Brother are probably the two best makers for this in my view.
 

PaulSB

Legendary Member
Proto said:
1) How successful is sending and receiving fax straight to the PC? Any software recommendations or just use what comes with the hardware?

2) Any preferred brands, models? Not too bothered about price, would rather select on basis of quality.

3) Anything else I need to know?

You are not alone, we still rely on faxes to receive customer orders as a section of our customer base still do not use e-mail or, and more likely, the person placing the order can't get access to a PC at the time of ordering. For those customers who order by fax we usually have to send the order forms by fax. I'm not a fan of multi-function machines and do not trust direct receipt of faxes on to the PC - it doesn't always work. So I suggest the following:

1. Purchase Winfax Pro faxing software. I've used this for 15 years to SEND and it's brilliant. I particularly like being able to send multiple faxes with a personalised name etc on the cover sheet. This software also receives and it generally works well however when there is a problem it becomes very frustrating, consequently we still have a fax machine for receiving. The receive to PC problem arises because it's likely anyone still using a fax on a regular basis will be using an old, slow machine and your new and fast PC may disconnect before the slower machine connects properly. No doubt techies will tell you this doesn't happen or can be fixed. Years of experience tells me it does and can't be!!! There are plenty of reasonable quality cheap fax machines around.

Don't use the fax software that Microsoft have supplied on your machine - it's rubbish. Again years of experience.

2. While I don't like multi-function machines, and would never buy one to use as a fax, I can recommend the Brother DCP-167C printer/scanner/copier. We have one in the office, mainly because we needed a scanner for occassional use for one specific customer. It's used to about the same level you describe, it's not fast but quality is very nice and at £90 reasonably priced. We have a lot of printing to do and I wouldn't chose this as our primary machine (we have a Canon and HP which do all the volume work) but it should be fine for your needs.

You did mention money was not the primary concern. If one looks at it from this side I'd buy a quality fax - Samsung are very good at around £150 and a high quality printer. We have a very nice Canon which was about £130-140 but is rather slow with excellent quality and an HP that was around £100 but chucks out paper at an astonishing rate!
 
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