Laser-Faxmachine / All-in-one?

I would investigate Brother. They have a very effective system for installing drivers under Linux, and I've never had a problem with their b/w laser printers and multifunctional print/scan/copy devices. Whether or not they do faxes....?

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I have a Brother MFC-9340CDW laser /printer/scanner/fax/copier. It's getting a bit old now but it still runs fine. I have never used the fax-so I'm unable to report

regards

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Well, those are what give you the PPD files that Linux needs.

A slightly tangential report. When I was looking for a scanner, I discovered that the speed of the scanners differed hugely (by factors of

10). I finally settled on an Epson 1660 scanner, which is fast (perhaps 5 sec for a 300dpi full page, slower for higher resulution vs a minute for one of the other models I tried).

Recall that a multifuction has to get three things right (printing, scanning and faxing) and a cheap multifunction has to distribute the money amongst three devices--ie, don't expect great behaviour out of a cheap multifuction.

Do you really need fax? Can you not email the pictures? Do you have and old faxmodem lying around that you could use?

Hi all,

thanks for the recommendations!

Well, the mentioned all-in-one fax machines from Brother indeed seem to be a good choice. My other laser printer, Brother HL5450DN, also has a paper drawer -- this prevents the paper from getting transported skewed due to dust and no spiders crapping on it --, I can simply install it via PCL and start printing from every Linux box. And it looks as if the all-in-one fax devices are similar.

B.t.w.: Anyone have experience with Brother MFC-L2710DW family? Brother claims that they can interwork with SANE scanning. Over LAN, or via USB only?

@ William Unruh:

Yes, I need that from time to time.

I can, but my parents can't. The machine will be used by them most of the time. So, it should be easy to handle, also :-)

But when I use the fax, it should be capable of sending in high / "fine" resolution. That's one of the features promised by HP but dont't work.

Best regards,

Markus

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Have you looked at the list of CUPS-supported printers:

And, of push comes to shove and the printer you want isn't supported but has a proper manual, there appears to be enough information at

to let you build CUPS printer definition files for it.

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I am using a Brother bubblejet MFC. I don't semd faxes, but sometimes, I want to print scans. Speed is not a problem, but for better quality, I find that the driver for scanning under Windows 10 gives a far superior result. Maybe it is Linux, not the MFC, that is the limiting factor?

Maybe the windows drivers are more sophisticated and can get more out of your scanner. Yes. Such things may happen.

Have you been looking for an update to Sane / Sane-Gimp?

And, first I was searching for a solution to use SANE over network. But today's all-in-one models from Brother provide fax-to-email. This seems to me more practical, since otherwise one would have to jump between PC and fax. So, you just say what and how to scan and walk to your PC. Let's see how this works.

Best regards,

Markus

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For what it's worth, I'm using an Epson WF-2540 on my desktop box running Stretch. The scanner gets along well with xsane, what little printing I do comes out OK, and if I need to send a fax I just plug the phone line into it and use it stand-alone. I access it via wifi, as does my wife's Macbook. It does the job.

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William, in a multifuntion printer / scan / fax, the modemfax is INSIDE the printer. ;-)

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You can scan to TIF, and send with a FAX modem. You know, the old FAX modem nobody uses any more.

Strange but true.

I have done it.

That's how my insurance agent got a copy of the car registration. They would not accept me just driving up and giving them a copy. It *had* to be faxed. It's some sort of ancient ritual.

Here, some insurance agents celebrate the arrival of a new FAX from a customer. That's Stonehenge in the background.

Paul

Yes, I know. I am suggesting that he get a good printer, a good scanner and a faxmodem. You know-- the Unix philosophy-- small items each of which does its job well, lined together to acmplish the task?

It's been a very long time, but I don't recall such a thing as a 'good' faxmodem. Either they didn't work reliably due to differences in AT command sets, or you had to install Winmodem drivers that used your CPU to do the signal processing, but with Windows driver hell (and rarely on Linux). In the intervening time the drivers have rotted and the hardware ended up at lowest-common-denominator such that I'm doubtful you can buy a new modem today that will work out of the box for sending faxes from Linux.

The advantage of a multifunction device is that the vendor has tested the whole workflow - scan/send/receive/print - and all the pieces work together. As a standalone device there's no drivers to mess with if you are faxing from paper, and printing then scanning is the backup plan if there's problems with fax drivers from Linux.

Theo

I never found a 'bad' one.

Good lord. No. use a proper US robotics external one and a serial driver.

there are decent fax programs for linux - we had unix ones working on SUN back in the day. I think we used hylafax.

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I have never ever sent or received faxes other than through modem and computer. The only "real" fax machine I bought or used was a gift for my daughter on her fifth birthday. I have never considered them anything else but toys for small children and people of similar intellectual and technical ability like lawyers.

I still have some old an very high quality modems and can use them with the old software running in an emulated Atari computer. But nowadays I use service providers. One receives faxes sent to my diverted fax number and passes them on to me as mail attachments and the other prints, folds, wraps, and posts my letters sent to him as PDF and can do the same for fax.

Faxing has become so rare an exception today that I would not buy anything new for the purpose. I have received very few faxes in the last decade and all of them were spam or scam.

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My sentiments.

There are online fax sending services if you must, and I am not sure of anyone - even lawyers - who still insist on faxes, though many have them.

At my last brush with lawyers it was a password access to a drop box in which PDFS could be uploaded and downloaded.

That was considered to be sufficiently authenticated.

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Yes, winmodems were a bit of a mess, but many were not winmodems and they worked fine. Yes, perhaps their command sets were not exactly the Hayes command set, but those could be sused out pretty easily. I never had any trouble (and in fact still have on permanatly attached to one of my computers just in case I wanted to send a fax. Still works fine on Mageia 7 US Robotics faxmodem).

On Windows. These are far more likely to be "winmodems" and "winprinters" (printers whichonly accept raw scanlines with nointernal interpreter).

I gather there was some faxing going on behind the scenes when I bought a house last year. I don?t know if any of the parties involved insist on it as such, or if they were all just keeping on with the communication channel they already knew well.

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There's one thing possibly unknown here, and that's the big advantage with FAX: FAX is not a one way thing like email, but a two way connection between the fax machines. The sending machine will only start sending after the receiving partner said: 'All OK here, paper ready, send your data'.

Only if the data was receifed complete and OK and could be printed (all verified by transmisson software) the receifer will send back: 'OK got your data at [time, date]'. The sending machine will put that into its logfile und the sender has now a shure evidence that the sending was readable reproduced at the destination.

Together with the timestamp quite important for a lawyer.

PC-software-fax fakes the paper, and if the pc crashes later, that's at the expense of the receiver, the sender has the proof of delivery,

Kallu

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