Panasonic KX-FHD331 Plain Paper Fax Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I bought this item largely based on the two 5-star reviews on this site and of course its very low price. I'm now feeling a bit disappointed.
After setting the machine up, I discovered there are a couple of things I'm not crazy about. First, the unit uses thermal heat transfer, so you need to buy "ink film" instead of ink cartridges. An entire page worth of film gets used every time you receive a fax or make a copy, regarless of whether the page is BLANK or totally BLACK. This can add up to a lot of waste. Sometimes I like to make a copy of something that doesn't take up a whole page, like a shopping receipt, and I'm paying for a whole black page with this machine. (Faxes work out to about ten cents a copy, depending of course on what you pay for ink film refills.)
Second, the used ink film serves as a negative of every fax you've received and every copy you've made. If you receive anything confidential or sensitive, you're going to want to be careful about how you dispose of your used ink film because you can read every letter printed on the film.
Third, the page-feed mechanism used for scanning documents seems incapable of handling anything other than a regular sheet of paper. I have tried several times to copy a 3x5 inch shopping receipt with this unit, and so far I haven't succeeded. My old unit could handle that task easily.
I'm left to consider returning the unit for one that can handle smaller pieces of paper and that doesn't use the ink film technology.
In fairness, I should also point out the things I do like about the unit. An advantage of the ink film is that it is actually water-resistant, unlike the ink supplied in some cartridges (like the one my old machine used). The set-up for this machine, while not as simple as some units, was doable within a few minutes. Note however that I didn't like the fact that I had to enter a two digit code from the manual to set up some features -- I couldn't just flip through menus to get what I wanted. There are lots of options for setting up distinctive ring tone answering, and you can choose the number of rings before fax pick-up (between 1 and 3 rings, inclusive). It's a small machine which is nice for small workspaces. You can choose three different ring types (though they are all pretty similar) and you can alter volume both for rings and for the handset.
Bottom line: this affordable machine will be great for some users, but unfortunately I'm not one of them.

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