Plain Paper Fax Machines

We have been using plain paper fax machines in our office for a few months now, and I think that there are decidedly mixed feelings about the results. We are a small, high tech company, and so we thought that laser fax machines were a bit unnecessary and imprecise. There is this snobbery in parts of the electronic community that holds that paper is on its way out, and good riddance. They feel that technologies such as plain paper fax machines, or even printers, will soon become permanently obsolete, and that it is for the high tech industry to lead the way to getting rid of this stuff. Out with the old and in with the new is what the philosophers of the future say, but I think that this is a bunch of rubbish. The fact is that plain paper fax machines do a great job. They have been around for a while, and so there is the convenience factor of most offices having them. Beyond that, it is nice to have a physical copy of a document from time to time, and plain paper fax machines do an admirable job of creating one of those. I think it will still be quite some time before we can really say that they belong in the trash, don't you?
 

Of course, not every  plain paper fax machine is the same, as we found out the hard way. It was such a pain in the neck to get the tech geeks to accept the plain paper fax machines at all, that we ended up compromising. We gave in to their demands to make plain paper fax machines as small a part of our expenditures as possible, with disastrous results. The cheap plain paper fax machines we bought may have cost half as much as the high quality ones, but they were not worth a third as much. If you are buying an expensive piece of electronic equipment, it is more than worth shelling out a couple of extra bucks to make sure that you get one that works. Otherwise, you will have to just turn around and buy another one anyway. Now we have had to spend almost twice as much on plain paper fax machines as we would have otherwise, and that is a real waste of money. If we had not been so stingy in the first place, we would be set by now.