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Previous The LowDown on Buying a Copier Given these considerations, you must carefully make your decision. Please do before spending $2000 on a copier that you may not even need or even like. If you have a budget of under $500, then go right to one of the personal copiers offered by Canon. You can't go wrong with these. They don't need service technicians, the drum and toner is always bundled together, and they are maintenance free and dummy proof. You won't ever have to call in a $90/ hour technician to fix your copier. Most will do some enlargement and reducement but that's about it. Everything else is manual, and these type of copiers are recommended for small offices and for low copier counts per month. Features and Considerations If you need stapling and collating features, then you have to consider one of the full featured larger machines by Canon, Sharp or Toshiba. (Other brands are available too such as Panasonic, Xerox and Copystar). When you move up into this league, the options can get quite daunting. You have many options in this league. You can get network capability, fax options and then all the other features we just mentioned above. Copy machines have become quite complex in the last ten years. Let's say you have a stack of paper you need to copy (100 pages). Are you seriously going to copy each one, one by one, by hand? Ok, let's get real. We need an automatic feeder and collater. If this is a common task in the office, this feature alone will save your company money in time and labor. You don't want your expensive secretary standing at the copier for 2 hours making copies. She won't appreciate it either if this is a common occurence. Copiers with the collating option can save your company hundreds of dollars every month and is well worth it. Here are my favorite brands. Don't ask me why, I just prefer them for their quality, warranty and company history: Canon, Toshiba, Sharp. Buying a Fax Machine Fax Machines can be found for under $90 today. Thermal units were very popular due to their lower costs, but now plain paper facsimiles and fax machines are the norm. Fax machines are one of those consumer goods that need high use and infiltration in order to have greater value. For example, if only one person had a fax machine, the unit is basically useless. Who would you send a fax to? Once two and more people began to own fax machines, the use and value of the facsimile grew in value and popularity. The more people have it, the greater value it has, the more people will use it, and its use continues to grow. Fax machines is one of those units that have "touch and feel" value to them. You can touch and feel the result of what a fax machine creates. Compare this to a digital file or email. You cannot touch or feel it. It has to be printed, and then it becomes "real". Hence, the popularity of fax machines have continued to exponentially grow. They have become legal documents, whereas before a signed signature had to be an original. Today, a faxed signature is just as good. Low Cost Fax Machines Make Sense Fax machine manufacturers have answered the market call for inexpensive units. Brother especially have dominated this market with their many low end facsimiles. Sharp, Toshiba and Panasonic have models in this price range, but Brother has done exceptionally well in pricing and marketing their low end models. Fax machine features include, plain paper vs. thermal, automatic cutting, memory storage, automatic faxing after hours, and queueing features. Fax machines today is a fusion of computer and traditional facsimile. A Computer as a Fax Machine? I personally like to use my computer to receive faxes, using the built in Microsoft Fax program to recieve and review faxes before printing them on my laser printer. You can also buy Symantec's Winfax Pro. There are also numerous free programs you can use. The trash spam faxes I receive, I delete. I can then use the physical fax machine unit to send out faxes. So, I use my personal computer to receive faxes and the fax machine to send out. Your needs and office requirements may differ. If you have a large mortgage office, you may need a large full size fax machine that can do it all. It would have to be able to print, receive and process hundreds of documents per day, with automatic queueing and routing features. Next up: Maintaining your copier and fax machine. Who wants to do this dirty work? << Previous |