Excellent Corporate Fax Machine

The Brother Intellifax 5750e does an all around outstanding job. Faxing is a critical task for a mortgage broker.
I have tried just about all of the major machines on the market for the last 20 years and I would argue that
there isn't better machine on the market for any price. The bigger more expensive machines do not do a better job. In most cases the larger machines are part of a larger automated system that is not covered by this review or they are a pain in the neck.

Right out of the box our Intellifax 5750e has been performing with absolutely zero problems. Everyone in the office loves this machine. We have been dealing with bad fax machines for years. This machine is outstanding I rate it a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10!

Because of the volume of faxing we do, about 50/50 outgoing and incoming our company added the additional drawer to hold legal sized reception. I ordered the second paper cassette online for about $150.

The fax machine performs outstandingly with both paper cassettes. The machine intelligently selects the proper size paper for the incoming fax, without the annoying shrinking of images. If someone sends us a long multi page contract with mixed sizes of documents, our machine will properly print them on the respective paper size. If you are in our business, getting documents on legal size paper is important for accuracy and minimizing distorted images. We had a $2000 Panafax dx2000 in our office that couldn't do anything very well, and could never print a contract out properly; don't get me started about that machine because people should be warned about that one.

Print quality is excellent. The machine has a USB interface and doubles as a good printer. I had my computer hooked up the fax machine because is was closer than the main printer and it worked very well. The printer driver that you download from the web is straightforward and installed without a hitch.

Network Faxing. This is our second large Brother Intellifax machine. Our first unit (Intellifax 4100) is essentially the same machine except for certain features available only on the 4750e models and above. That is what I am going to discuss here. The network fax server enables us to have the fax machine forward all incoming faxes to our servers for archive and storage purposes. Having experience with network fax machines in the past has illuminated the true quality and value of this machine. The setup was very straight forward for the most part. The exception is that with the network card (8100n Brother model NIC) that you have to reference a separate manual to program your iFax functions for the machine. The web based setup is awesome! Besides being able to program your auto dial numbers and groups via web browser, you can also do most of your programming for the machine with a web browser. Please note that your initial programming must be done from the panel so you can find the machine on the network. After that initial setup, you can do 100% of your programming from your web configuration utility. This fax machine also doubles as a network print server as well. Printing from a fax machine is not something we do because the machine is always busy, so I cannot comment much on that except to say that it uses the same web interface. Having used the Panasonic Panafax series of machines in the past [with amazingly poor results I might add] I can categorically state that this machine represents a very sound investment for a corporate or workgroup fax, for just about any company. Fax technology is kind of boring and doesn't get a lot of upgrades. The fact of the matter is, when you need a fax, nothing else will do. This machine is in my opinion possibly the best fax machine on the market today for the money. It works! We didn't have to hire a programmer to work for 4 hours to set up our fax server like in the past [I would like to add that our Panafax machine refused to work on our mail server because its technology is at least 15 years old and most servers today will not permit open relays]. I did it myself quite simply!

The paper feed mechanism is reliable and trouble free. We routinely send documents ranging from 25-50 pages, legal size all day. The machine rarely jams, and its simple design allows staff to easily recover from jams [these jams are usually due to operator error rather than the machine]. This is very important in an office where the machine is constantly used, and is heavily relied upon for bringing income to the company. This machine never misses a fax. We have no more lost faxes. Its scan speed and use of memory is intuitive and automatic. You can scan an entire large document and then start a second fax before the first is complete without problems. Our machine is so busy that it can no longer be used as a printer because it is always in use.

We purchase toner online from one of many merchants for about $40. Average cost for the Intellifax 5750e is between $900-$1500. Supplies and service are widely available for this machine. Supplies cost about 25% less than the major brands. By the way, these machines seem to never break down. I have had several Brother Laser fax machines [Brother Intellifax line] with similar durability and reliability over the last several years.

What's not to love about this machine? You know what really made me mad about this machine? It was the fact that over the years we have purchased so many crappy fax machines. This one does what it needs to do very well, no problems with heavy use, low cost for machine and consumables and they don't break down or have to be cleaned all the time. If you are a business owner or decision maker, I strongly suggest you consider this machine or others in its class. Just try one of them. After it is installed, observe the people who use the machine. Talk to them. Our administrators were amazed by the speed of its scanning and how they didn't have to stand by the machine to feed pages to it. They were absolutely giddy about the whole thing. You won't be able to take it back.

Update to review 10/25/2005

After over 10,000 cycles on the machine over the last year the machine is still performing very well. Beware of remanufactured drums for this machine. We have had some problems with the remanufactured drums on the unit. My suggestion is to use NEW OEM drum kits ($129) rather than remanufactured ones because the little nylon gears strip out in them. We have no problem with refilled toners (found for $20 from tonerpirates.com). We are now up to 3 machines for our offices with no major problems other than the occasional paper jam or operator error.

One other note, make sure you put this device on a UPS (uninterruptible power supply). The Intellifax 5750e has a built in print/fax server. Performance is much better with a UPS attached (no lost faxes or data). This recommendation comes from Brother technicians.

Update:

Well, after 2 years our first Brother 5750E needed a service call. After 300,000 pages, it needed a new pickup roller for the bottom tray and one of the paper guides was misaligned. Total cost for service call $125 (including a cleaning of machine) our company is still very happy with the performance of the machine. We now have 4 5750e's in service with very few problems. This machine has been a very good value for us with the volume of faxes we get. The pickup roller is a consumable part that can be ordered online for about $20. I recommend you have a qualified tech do the repair. Call Brother for the location of a factory authorized rep. near you if you should ever need service. For most companies, it should only need service every 2 or 3 years (twice a year for our other office equipment) if ever. That depends on your use.

Also, try to stay away from 'refurbished' units. You are better off with new or used. 'Refurbished’ units tend to have intermittent electronic problems that are difficult to diagnose.