Faxing still on the periphery

By VIKKI BLAND

Mark Twain once said "the report of my death was an exaggeration". So it is for the humble office fax machine.

When email exploded in the late 1990s, it was widely predicted that the fax machine would soon be obsolete. Yet more than six years later, people still feel the need to fax. Why?

Enter this question into a web search engine and you'll find varied responses (see the side box). However, people generally still fax for three main reasons: they don't have the scanning equipment to make an electronic file of a hard copy image; they don't trust email to deliver important documents and are wary of email data security risks; and habit - faxing is familiar, email may not be.

The fax is undeniably still popular with some individuals for these reasons - and in countries where the concept of email and e-business is still finding its feet because telecommunications networks are immature.

However, the demand for faxing is declining as people become more comfortable and skilled in the use of email and in software programmes capable of sending and receiving faxes electronically.

As a result, office product makers have all but stopped producing single, stand alone fax machines. Instead, the fax is now typically one element of a multifunctional peripheral device - or MFP. These are three or four machines integrated into one device; often a printer, fax machine and scanner. Some include a photocopier.

Depending on model, MFPs can print in colour or black and white; be as large as a top-of-the-range photocopier or smaller than a toaster; and cost tens of thousands of dollars or just a few hundred.

According to research groups like Gartner and IDC, the worldwide MFP market is booming and is a significant source of growth for hardware manufacturers - particularly in the small to medium business sector and among businesses that want to print, fax and scan in colour.

In New Zealand, the leading inkjet MFP makers are Hewlett Packard, Brother and Canon respectively. Other players include Ricoh, Fuji Xerox, Konica Minolta and Lexmark.

MFP prices range from $199 for basic machines to more than $30,000 depending on features and capacity and whether the business wants to print in colour or black and white.

So what has happened to the fax machine in the meantime?

Is new fax technology still developed or is the fax machine simply a token element of a modern MFP designed to be phased out over time?

Ernie Thompson, marketing executive for Brother International New Zealand, says improvements to fax technologies will continue in areas such as fax transmission speed, image resolution, expanded memory and plain paper printing.

He says it is also possible to send and receive glossy, photo-quality faxes from compatible colour fax machines.

Thompson says high resolution, borderless and colour faxing are standard features of Brother fax machines and confirms the demise of the fax has not eventuated despite email.

"Many industries and businesses still rely on [the fax] as a medium for serious communication."


Web ramblings on faxes


* "Faxes got easy to use about 10 years ago. People are still getting the hang of email."

* "The 'normal' people I know don't have any idea how to scan. They probably do know how to use a fax machine though."

* "Maybe they just don't want the headache of administering four zillion email accounts when they have a perfectly good fax machine sitting right there."

* "If fax machines mysteriously disappeared overnight, not a single construction project would ever be finished ever again."

* "The Sasser Worm doesn't hit fax machines."

* "Signatures on faxes are valid documentation for the purpose of maintaining records. Sometimes an email attachment is not considered legally valid, but a fax is because it can be signed."

* "[Unlike email] I presume they are forced to at least glance at my faxes before throwing them away."

Extracted from 2004 web forum entries.


Fast fax facts


* The foundation technology for the fax machine was patented as early as 1843 by Scotsman Alexander Bain.

* In 1902 German Arthur Korn developed the first photo electric scanning system and by 1922 faxes were sent across the Atlantic.

* On March 4, 1955, the first radio facsimile transmission was sent across the United States.

* Fax machine use exploded in the 1980s when a standard protocol was developed that allowed faxes to be sent at speeds of 9.6Kbps over a standard telephone line. The standard modem inside your modern PC can send data at a speed of 56Kbps.