In last few decades, there has been a sea change in the way we communicate. Starting from sending letters in post to today’s social networking sites, mankind has evolved a lot. With the advent of emails and mobile phones, data as well as messages can be conveyed in no time. Still there are times when you need to send some important documents and want them to reach as early as possible. In such case, an electronic device that comes first in mind is Fax Machine.

First fax machine was invented in early 70s. Since there has been many up gradations and developments making the current generation of machines very sophisticated and easy to use, many suppliers have developed machines that in addition to faxing also provide various other office applications like copying, scanning among others. And technological advances have also made new machines very cost effective that can be affordable by most offices, making it must have in all service oriented companies.

Fax machine uses telephone cables for transferring data from one point to other. Functioning of such a machine is very simple, the person who wants to send a document has to put it on scanning glass of his machine and dial number of recipient. The receiving party gets a ring on his machine and has to just press start and the document is printed at his machine. In all this process fax machine at senders end works like a scanner first and scans the paper and then converts it into digital form. This message is then sent to receiver’s machine through telecommunication lines. Now the recipient machine converts digital message into printable version and works as printer for it to reproduce the document. Fax machine not only exactly copies the paper put in the tray but can also increase or decrease the size without harming the print quality.

Fax machine has been widely used by businesses from the last couple of decades so much that at one point, it was voted as must have office equipment in business survey. But with newer technologies being invented, popularity of fax machine is steadily declining. Through some inventions like E-mail, one can scan the document and mail it without involving any cost. This advantage of email is making fax machines less and less useful. The same is reflected also in sales numbers and development process of fax machines. Even after this one can be sure that fax machines are here to stay for next few years as they have serviced enterprises for many years.