Fax Away

True, we have talked abut faxing over the internet. And sure it can save you some cash. But the Net is still to get as ubiquitous as many of us like it to be, and till then, we are stuck with the fax machine. Even if that happens, perhaps the fax machine will never be chucked out the window.

In all probability, the fax machine will take on internet capabilities as have a lot of other computing devices such as cellphones and handheld computers and palmtops. There are indicatiosn that this is already happening a new fax machine from Panasonic has the facility to key in an e-mail address which the machine transmits over the internet to the receivers computer or internet account.

Again, the requirements of any small office or company means faxing a lot of hard copy - something that is just not possible using PC fax, without adding on expensive scanners. Local language faxes are another problem area for PC faxing.

For the small office and business, still, it looks like fax machines are the way to go. The fax machine market is still vibrant, and there are quite a handful of international players in the market. All players agree that demand is growing, but there is intense competition brewing at the low end of the market, which has resulted in some of the players bowing out.

Here, the target buyer is the small office and individual user, who is extremely price sensitive. Competitive price cutting has brought down prices down to less than Rs 15,000 at the low end.

The market is now dominated by Modi Xerox, which has a share of approx. 22 per cent in the number of units shipped. The company has models that fit well into every segment of the market. next year, the market is expected to grow by almost 1,00,000 units.

At the low end, all the machines offer practically similar features. All of them transmit at a speed of 9600 bps. At those speeds, a company that faxes about 30 pages a day might start to feel the pinch, especially if a majority of them are international faxes where every second can add to your charges. Fax machines that are capable of sending pages at speeds of 14400 bps are usually more expensive than their slower counterparts by above Rs 4,000.

But the difference evens itself out quite soon if you are heavy user or if you send a number of international faxes.

Low-end machines usually use thermal faxing, where there are less moving parts to mess up the machine, making them more reliable. They are bit more cumbersome to use, as they use thermal paper which gets curled easily under heat. Apart from this, the paper has to be kept in roles, which also necessitates a cutter - a part of the fax machine which is prone to frequent jamming.

Companies such as HP offer faxes that are cheap and use plain paper. Though this gets rid of the messiness of thermal paper, they use inkjet technology for printing - a forte of companies such as HP which pioneered inkjet printer technology. Inkjet printing is not as fast as thermal, and if you receive many faxes a day, the printing itself can engage the fax machine as you wait for long printing jobs to finish.

At the top end, fax machines may use LED printing which uses laser printer technology. While the immediate benefit is that of faster printing, they are bound to be expensive there just a few LED faxes in the Indian market, and they are priced upwards of Rs 40,000 approximately.

Quick Scan, not always a feature of low-end machines, makes it easy for you scan a document into memory, from where the machine will send it to the destination as and when it negotiates a connection. Here, more memory too will be useful, as it means that more pages can be kept in memory, leaving you free to resume other work.

More memory is also handy when the machine runs out of paper. Not all low-end machines feature out of paper reception but if your fax machine does, it will continue receiving a number of pages even if the machines runs out of paper. But the usefulness of this feature is limited by the amount of memory the machine has.

As the price goes up, features such as one-touch dialing take on more numbers, and the memory can go up to 1 MB. Dual scan is a feature which will make it possible to scan a document, when the machine is already receiving a fax document. Then, the document that you scan goes into memory. After the telephone line becomes free, the machine negotiates a connection with the destination number and sends the fax from memory.

Multipurpose fax machines are another novelty in the market. These are fax machines that double as scanners and printers. Lookswise, they often resemble printers or scanners more than ordinary fax machines. While pricing is a bit on the high side, these save the small office an enormous amount of desktop real estate.

The hassles are obvious - apart from the fact that they use inkjet printing which is slow to begin with, only one of the features can be used at a time. You cannot scan while you are faxing, and cannot receive and print a fax while you print a Microsoft Office document.

But if desktop space is at a premium in your office, perhaps you should look at the all-in-ones from Canon and Hewlett-Packard. This is one market that will take at least a couple of years to grow.

At the bottom end, the features are pretty weak, and the machines score low on aesthetics - both of which are not important to the small office user.

But the small business user is very conscious of reliability and service, and the trend is to move away from unknown brandnames to slightly more expensive but reputed brands.

Even the foreign brands have their low-end machines, but the a duty of above 55 per cent means that they are sold at twice their international price. But despite everything , this is a market that has shown growth in spite of the overall economic slowdown. While the cut-throat competition has resulted in a spurt in demand in the last year, the industry hopes that a reduction in duties will see it through the next year.

Despite threats from PC fax modems, e-mail and internet faxing, fax machines are still going strong, adding on new apabilities.

FAX FACTS

Todays Fax Market is Still Growing

Fortune 500 companies spend an average of $15 million per year on faxing.

Fax costs are expected to increase an average of 12per cent over the next year.

Fax trails only the telephone as the most reliable method to get messages delivered.

It is preferred over e-mail, overnight courier and voice mail. Fax is used when a fast response is needed and a hard copy is required.

Over 60per cent of business professionals at both large and small companies are faxing more than they did last year.

Fortune 500 employees report that they fax an aver age of 41 five-page documents per day.

Employees at mid-sized companies report faxing an average of 36 four-page documents per day.

Todays Fax Market is not being eroded by e-mail

Only 14per cent of computers have internet access today.

60 - 70per cent of e-mail is used for intra-company communication.

55per cent of Fortune 500 employees and 68per cent of mid-sized company employees believe that fax is easier to use than e-mail.

Fax usage is just as high for companies that use e-mail as for those that dont.

Only 33per cent of business professionals rated e-mail as extremely easy to use. 56per cent rated faxing as extremely easy.

Source: 1996 Gallup/Pitney Bowes study