You are currently viewing What Are Fax Machines And How Do They Work?

What Are Fax Machines And How Do They Work?

  • Post author:
  • Post category:Uncategorized
  • Post comments:0 Comments

A fax machine was first used in 1840. This was way before the first telephone was introduced. Since the advent of the internet, fax technology is no longer as popular. However, there are still businesses all over the world that still make use of fax machines. They are immediate and do not require internet access. For a technology that has been around for so long, it is pretty advanced.

 

Fax machines are a fast and immediate way to send documents using a telephone. A fax machine is designed to both send and receive documents. The machine has a sending part and a receiving part. The sending part is like a computer scanner that scans just one part of a document per time. It can also only do this in black and white.

 

Fax Machine

 

The machine pretty much looks at each line of text separately and detects the areas in black and white. It then transmits a kind of electric pulse down the phone line to represent white and another to represent black. The phone takes this information and turns it to words that can be received on the other end of the fax machine. It takes about a minute to transmit the information to the other end.

 

What happens in Fax Machines?

When you want to send a fax message, you put the document into the input slot, and it gets caught between several pairs of rollers. If you are using a larger fax machine, it has inbuilt feeders that can be fed multiple pages at a time. So as the paper moves, a bright light shines in it. The black areas reflex little or no light, and the white area reflects a bright light.

 

The light then reflects into the light-detecting charged-coupled device (CCD) which turns the analogue pattern of black and white areas on the page into a digital pattern of binary zeros and one. It then passes the information to an electronic circuit. The circuit will send the digital information down the telephone line to the receiving fax machine.

 

Modern printers can send fax messages too

 

Upon receipt, the same circuits will take the incoming digital information and passes it through an inbuilt printer. In a regular fax machine, the paper is pulled from a large roll into the machine. The printer will then reproduce the incoming fax on the paper. A blade will now cut the page, and the printed fax will come out from the output slot. It is not advisable, however, to use a fax machine to send photos because it will only turn everything into black and white.

 

Fax machines are very simple devices. All you need to do is put in your document, dial the number, wait for the other machine to reply and just hit the Start button. Most fax machines will then automatically receive the document being sent on auto mode.

 

It sounds great, but fax papers are quite expensive because they are different from the usual papers we use. They are also difficult to recycle and fade very quickly. It is also probably not the best way to send lots of files. It will be much easier to use Wetransfer to send lots of files that will go at once than to use an hour to transfer documents with a fax machine.

Leave a Reply