*NEWS*TECHNOLOGY OF THE FAX MACHINE

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Date: Tuesday March 29, 2005 10:24:00 am
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    <>The Fax Machine:
    Technology That Refuses to die
     



    iF any of Rodney Eddins’s accounting clients want his undivided attention at
    work first thing in the morning, they should shun e-mail or his telephone
    answering machine. Instead, they should send him a fax.

    “The first thing I look at when I arrive is the incoming tray of my fax
    machine,” said Mr. Eddins, a certified public accountant in Orlando, Fla., who
    has had his own practice for a decade. “If there’s paper there, I feel like I
    have to look at it.” Only after he sorts through the morning’s faxes – though
    most on a recent day were ads like one for a workplace deodorizing service –
    does Mr. Eddins log on to his computer and listen to his phone messages.

    Still, like many other people, Mr. Eddins readily acknowledges a tortured
    relationship with his fax machine. Finding it essential for transmitting
    sensitive accounting documents and forms that require signatures, like tax
    returns, he grudgingly tolerates the noise and mess, not to mention the deluge
    of junk faxes. “I actually hate my fax machine,” he said. “But I need it.”

    In an office world that has gone largely digital, hand-held and wireless, the
    fax machine is ancient technology that just won’t go away. No one shows off her
    fax machine the way she might, say, a BLACK BERRY. Yet the fax persists as a mockery of the
    much-predicted paperless society.

    “Back in the mid-1990’s, when e-mail was really coming into its own, we had
    high-priced consultants telling us that the fax was going the way of the horse
    and buggy,” said Jonathan Bees, then a product manager for office machines at
    Konica; he is now editor in chief of Better Buys for Business magazine. Among
    the products he reviews for consumers these days are fax machines. “They’re
    better than ever – quieter, faster and with clearer reproduction,” he said.
    “They haven’t been passed by, after all.”

    Some 1.5 million fax machines were sold in the United States last year for
    use at both businesses and homes, according to the Consumer Electronics
    Association, based in Arlington, Va. Manufacturers estimate that they sold
    500,000 more machines that combined a fax function with other functions, like
    copying and scanning.

    Although sales of stand-alone fax machines are well below their peak of 3.6
    million in 1997, some manufacturers say that if the multiuse machines are
    included, demand has been rising of late. “We have been seeing an increase in
    fax sales for the last four or five years,” said Paul Fountain, marketing
    product manager aT HP in San Diego.

    In 1994, Hewlett-Packard left the fax market, believing the predictions of
    impending obsolescence. But, Mr. Fountain said, “We came back in 1998 because we
    realized the fax was not going away.”

    While fax machines aren’t as prevalent as computers in the workplace or home
    offices, Bill Young, a communications coach at the Strickland Group in New York
    City, said, “The fax has important functions that e-mail simply hasn’t been able
    to take over.” Those would include reproducing signatures on documents like
    contracts, business proposals and medical prescriptions.

     CVS a 5,300-store chain, relies on fax machines as the
    most common means of receiving prescriptions, said Todd Andrews, a spokesman in
    Woonsocket, R.I. “The fax gives the pharmacist a written record of what the
    doctor ordered,” he said. Faxing avoids misunderstandings that can occur when
    prescriptions are phoned in – and it reduces or eliminates waiting time for
    customers who otherwise would deliver their prescriptions by hand. Of course,
    even with a fax, precise communication is still at the mercy of the doctor’s
    handwriting.

    Another factor in the fax’s favor is security. “With a fax, you don’t have to
    worry about computer hackers or someone stealing the password to the recipient’s
    e-mail,” Mr. Young said. “As long as there’s a person at the receiving fax ready
    to remove the paper, the message is confidential.” (Some computers have the
    capacity to convert the image of an incoming fax to e-mail, but that method
    loses the privacy advantage.)

    Falling prices have helped to maintain the fax’s popularity. “The fax machine
    you would buy at Costco or Staples 10 years ago for the home office would
    typically cost about $200,” Mr. Fountain said. “Better machines are available
    today for $45.” The $200 machine a decade ago would have been a stand-alone fax.
    Now, Hewlett offers the Fax 1050 – a combination fax, copier and answering
    machine – for $99.

    But faxes priced at $100 and less can have at least one drawback: they
    typically transmit and print at a rate of only about four pages a minute. More
    money buys more speed, among other things. One business model from Sharp is the
    FO DC525, which costs $3,000 and transmits and prints 20 pages a minute.

    COMMERCIAL machines are available for mass faxing of more than 100 pages a
    minute. But the prices of such machines can reach $70,000, and they are usually
    more the size of mainframe computers than office machines, so you won’t find
    them in the fax aisle at Staples.

    All of this has come too late to benefit the fax’s inventor, the Scottish
    physicist Alexander Bain. He patented the first primitive fax machine in 1843,
    some 30 years before the telephone. Called the “recording telegraph,” Mr. Bain’s
    invention used a stylus attached to a pendulum, which passed over metal type to
    sense light or dark spots on the plated “document” being sent. A pendulum on the
    receiving device made a stain on chemically treated paper when electric charges
    were sent on a telegraph line. But Mr. Bain’s innovation came nearly 100 years
    before the Information Age, and there was little demand for it. He died
    poor.

    Mr. Bain might have been mortified at one problem with today’s fax machines:
    their vulnerability to their own version of junk mail. Junk faxers can tie up
    machines and delay important messages, and some critics label them thieves.

    “They can steal a lot of paper from recipients who don’t even want to get
    their ads,” said Lawrence Markey Jr., a lawyer at the Foundation for Taxpayer
    and Consumer Rights in Santa Monica, Calif.

    He started suing junk faxers in 2001, in California small-claims courts. Such
    litigation is painstaking, he said. “I have collected about $5,000 so far from
    various companies,” he said, “not nearly enough to compensate for my time.” One
    plus, though, he said, is that junk faxers don’t seem to be dialing his number
    as often.

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