If you want to run a serious home business, you still have to have some sort of fax machine in your office. While most people think that the day of the fax is long gone, all the people who still hold on their machines seem to be business people. In other words, other businesses will eventually expect you to be able to send a fax and lose respect if you don’t have that capability. The appliance and electronics Sharp offers various fax machines, from the outdated UX 1300 printer with thermal roll toner to its modern UX-B800SE model that works on broadband and can send faxes to an email address.
How your machines prints to paper will greatly affect it’s beneficial use to you and how much it will cost you. Many faxes used to use thermal transfer rolls for printing faxes (like Sharp’s UX 1300). These use heat to transfer a scanned image and print it on a piece of paper. These are still around, but the quality of the print may not be to your liking (or it may be weird to install rolls of into a machine instead of a cartridge of ink or toner).
A newer version of fax machine is the type that prints using Inkjet ink. These run just like Inkjet printers people use at home, in fact some of those have fax capabilities now. They also tend to make better quality prints than the thermal rolls, although you shouldn’t assume that all Inkjet printers are the same. Some dedicated Inkjet faxes might not print as well as an Inkjet photo printer. Sharp makes an Inkjet fax, the UX-B20, that uses black Inkjet ink.
Laser machines are usually the best types of printers, although they can get expensive. These function just like other laser printers. They use a drum and toner like other laser printing devices. A problem with these is that they can be prohibitively expensive. Make sure you can use these fax machines as reliable copier or computer printer if you are going to spend the money on this technology. They are also much more expensive for color copies.
Another thing to consider is the price of toner. Thermal transfer rolls can print around 510 pages. They can generally be cheaper than laser toner. I was able to find some toner for the UX 1300 machine online for $37. These rolls are also more specialized and may be difficult to find in some stores.
Inkjet printers are much more common now. Fax machines that use this technology use the more readily available (and more easily installable) Inkjet cartridges. When I compared the cartridge for Sharp’s UXB20 to the thermal roll, the price was exactly the same. The website said the cartridge produces a “max” of 500 pages, so you might not get as much mileage with an Inkjet. The quality, however, will probably be much improved.
Toner for Laser copiers and printers will be much more expensive (cheapest at around $60, up to hundreds of dollars). They will also print thousands of pages before they have to be replaced, however. If you plan on making lots of copies or faxes then this may be the type of machine for you. It may even be cheaper in some cases when you compare cost per page, but it will be a much larger initial investment.
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