Perfect Fax For The Home Office

Author's Rating:

Pros: Small Footprint,Cheap consumables, Simple to use and maintain, Perfect fax for the home office environment.

Cons: Catch trays are optional.

The Bottom Line: 
For thirty dollars I could not ask for a better fax machine than this one for my home office. It fits like a glove.

Author's Review
I purchase my Intellifax 775 remanufactured from Staples with a $40.00 rebate so it netted out to thirty bucks and it was thirty dollars well spent. When the box arrived I was pleased to find that the unit looked brand new. You really could not tell that it is a remanufactured unit as well it functions flawlessly. Now that you now I got a real bargain I'll tell you a little about the machine itself.

The first thing you will notice about this machine is that it has nice small footprint and will easily sit atop a file cabinet with room to spare as it it does in my home office.
For me space is an issue and being able to get rid of the behemoth it replaced is a wonderful thing.

I have seen some reviews complaining about the print quality but I have none. It prints as well as the more expensive fax machine that it replaced and for me the quality of the printing is just fine especially at the price point that I paid. Remember this is not a ink jet photo printer, it's a plain old thermal ribbon fax machine and for me it works just fine.

Feature wise this fax machine is perfect for the home office. It's auto document feeder will autofeed up to ten sheets in a row and not once has it jammed or pulled in more than one sheet of paper at a time, very reliable. As for paper storage the rear paper holder will accomodate 100 sheets of paper, much more than I would ever need in my home office but if you should need more the units memory will store 25 pages in memory.

Transmission speed is at 9600 baud which is slower than the more expensive machines 14,400 baud rate but in this day and age phone calls are so cheap, who cares. This would have been an issue ten years ago when long distance calls were very expensive but today is in my opinion it is irrelavent.

At this price point the unit even supports distinctive alternate ring tones so you can use it on the same phone line as an answering machine without conflict. This feature has been overlooked by others who have reviewed this product and because of this thier reviews are wrong about using this unit or any other that support this feature on a single phone line with an answering device attached. Pay them no mind, here's how it works.

To set up distinctive ringing you call your phone company and order the service. The phone company will assign a seperate number that is pointed towards your regular number and as per the manual you tell them what kind of distinctive ring tone you want. For proper setup you make sure your answering machine picks up after four rings on all calls. When someone sends a you a fax to your fax number the fax machine will detect the distinctive ring after two rings and answer the call. If it does not detect a distinctive ring it will not pick up the call and the answering machine will pick up the call after the fourth ring. Thats how it works. I cannot believe how many reviews left this important and valuable feature out!!!

You can in fact use this machine in concert with your answering machine, you just need to order the distinctive ring feature from you phone company.


Setup is simple and straight forward on this unit via a front panel 5 button key layout and 2 line LCD Dislay. I have read some reviews complaining about the setup, may I suggest your very own telethon.

The unit uses a thermal ribbon system for printing as mentioned above and cost per page to print is much less than that of an inkjet. I purchased two after market replace replacement cartridges for fifteen dollars. This is good for 500 pages of printing. To do the same with an inkjet it would cost you sixty dollars to do the same thing. Another reason I like this thermal system is that you never have to worry about anything dryng out like my former inkjet used to do all the time and you never have to worry about clogged printheads. I have not had to change the cartridge yet but when I do I will update this review and let you know how easy or hard it is.

The trade off is printing that might not be as good as on some inkjet units but again I know this is a fax machine and not a photo printer and the printing may not be in the class of some more expensive inkjet unit but it is absolutley fine for what it is, a fax.

The only downside of this unit is that it does not come with a catch trays. The document catch trays are optional and sells for six dollars.

Bottom line for mw is that for thirty dollars I got a fax machine that has some great features and functionally fits perfectly in it's home office setting.