Nice fax machine for home or small office

We needed a plain paper fax machine for home use that could double as a copier to replace our old-fashioned thermal-roll machine. I saw this machine for sale at Costco for $99, less a $20 rebate (for a total of $80 when the check arrives) and decided to give it a shot.

We did not need (or want) a machine that had a built-in answering machine or cordless telephone. We intend to use this as a dedicated copier/fax machine only.

The main features that attracted us to it are that it holds 200 sheets of letter-size paper, has a feeder that takes up to 20 sheets, has 1.8 megs of memory (approx 100 pages), and works at 14.4.

Other nice features are 18 one-touch dial buttons, 81 speed dial numbers, 64 greyscale levels, and the fact that it uses ink instead of those annoying and expensive ribbons. The machine also has caller-id, which is a nice but not necessary touch on a fax line. We happen to have caller id on our fax line, so it's a cute feature for the fax machine. Also built-in, but not a feature that interested me is distinctive ring, which would be perfect for someone sharing a line with the machine. It also has the ability to go between your answering machine and the wall, so that the machine can "listen-in" for faxes during your outgoing message. It will intercept fax calls while staying out of your way on regular voice calls.

The machine was extremely easy to setup right out of the box. The pieces for the paper trays snapped together quickly and we never even needed to look at the instructions. When we opened the area for ink installation, the diagram on the door showed us exactly what needed to be done and it took only a few seconds to load the new cartridge.

Programming the machine was also easy. We've programmed fax machines before, so again it was barely necessary to refer to the instructions. Pushing "function" and browsing through the menus was pretty straightforward and would probably not be a big problem for anyone. There were only a few things that required looking-up because we did not know what some of the advanced features were!

The machine takes a few seconds to scan each page, whether you are copying or faxing. We're used to high-end machines at our job, so this machine feels slow to us - but we had to remind ourselves that it was a machine that cost under $100!

The machine loads the paper from the top, and therefore takes up a little more space than we'd like. We could not fit it in the same nook as our old machine because the shelf above got in the way of the feeder. We moved the machine to the top shelf to solve the problem, but would have preferred to keep it where the old machine went.