Brother Intellifax 4100 Fax Machine : The perfect fax machine for a bustling office

When it comes time to send a fax, you want to have assurances that there will be no problems sending it out, and that it will be easy for you to do. With the Brother Intellifax 4100 Fax Machine, you have everything you need to make sure that the job gets done right the first time. This is a nice compact machine that can help accentuate the business practices of any small office. It retails for around $300, and is well worth the price of purchase, because it does so well in office settings. It is designed to handle the big jobs, but to do them quickly rather than taking a long time to get into the system. The "system" being the network with which your information is transferred into, but with lower quality fax machines guarantees you nothing.

The first thing that the Brother Intellifax 4100 Fax Machine has to offer, is that it is easy to discern from looking at it, which keys will be necessary to complete a fax. The "Fax Start", "Stop/Exit". and "Hook" buttons are all very easy to find, and just as easy to use. The control panel of the machine is also set up in a manner that is not only easy to decipher, but is easy on the eyes as well. Some may take this lightly, but if you are in an office setting, working with the same piece of machinery for years, you have to at least like looking at it. While this machine does carry a high price tag, its list of features and its sturdy construction will allow it to hold up extremely well in busy office settings.

The 4100 has an 8MB memory, which allows it to store up to 500 pages if it runs out of paper mid-fax. The primary paper tray holds 250 pages, and the secondary tray can hold the same amount. It has a laser-print engine that yields a high-quality of up to 203x392 dpi, and it also contains a 32 character LCD. The one hold-up to people looking at fax machines in this price range is the transmission time of about a page every 6 seconds. This could be quite slow for people wanting to transmit more than 1000 KB per minute. The fax machine does tend to be quick at times, but at other times it can seem really slow, simply because of the comparison of the two times. It can be somewhat misleading if most of the faxes are quick, and then a couple take a long time, because it averages out badly, but at the end of the day you are more likely to remember the faxes that took forever, rather than the ones that were very easy.

The document feeder takes the pages face-down, and can hold up to 30-pages at one time. Another beautiful thing about it is the 182 separate locations that you can program into the machines. With that in mind, you can do Quick scans, which allow you to scan pages into the memory of the machine at nearly 2-3 seconds per page. This is quite fast, and I don't think I could handle trying to deal with it going faster than that. The tray can be adjusted to accommodate different paper sizes, and can even be used to fax copies of envelopes that need to be sent out. Not only that, but it allows you to sort, enlarge, or reduce the size of the copies that you are making, or the faxes that you are sending out. This can serve as a huge benefit to those people needing the machine to pull double duty.

At $299, this is not a fax machine that you can laugh at the price. It is built to last, and intended to be put to the test while being used. It comes with a one-year warranty if you are worried about it breaking, and thus far, at my place of business we have yet to have a problem with it. We also put it through the gambit when it comes to dealing with many, many faxes at the same time, and we have yet to come across a problem that it cannot solve. It is a great machine that has proven itself to be worth what we spent on it, and when you are dealing with Professors that need things sent out with no time to waste, you want a machine that is as reliable as this one. I have to say that my favorite feature that this one has, is if you dial your number and receive a busy signal, it will wait a minute and then redial it for you. This saves you the time of having to run back to the machine to make sure it is doing its job.

The machine also gives out a confirmation page when it has completed a set of actions. Whether it is able to send the fax, or unable to, it gives you a transaction page that tells you how many pages were sent, or if they weren't, it gives you the reason why it didn't happen. Everything about this fax machine makes it easy for the people in the office to use. It is not tough to teach new people how to use it, and even for international calls, it is simplicity at its finest. I highly recommend this fax machine as a tool that any small office setting can benefit from. In an office where faxes are going out every hour, this has been a savior to us on more than one occasion.

Main assets of the Brother Intellifax 4100 Fax Machine

* Transmission Speed: 6 Seconds Per Page

* Fax Speed: 14.4K BPS

* Fax Memory: 500 Pages

* Paper Handling: 30 Page Auto Document Feeder, 250 Sheet Input Capacity

* Fax Resolution: 203 x 392 dpi

* Print & Copy Speed: 15 ppm