Brother FAX 1030E Plain Paper

I had to set up an office on a shoestring. Well, actually it was in what used to be my sitting room but you know what I mean.

One of the things we needed was a plain paper fax. I used to have one of those giant toilet roll jobs but that was very inconvenient with long documents and kept getting jammed up. Anyway, we bought one of these machines and it has sat between me and my partner in crime for about eighteen months. Now I will ...
...and had resolved that today I would just read what others had written and keep my mouth shut. But I have just had an experience with this machine that prompted me to write.

It needed a new cartridge. Have you ever noticed that the ink always runs out in the middle of receiving a fax? Funny that...

Now, I've changed a cartridge before on this machine. It only took about half an hour and neccessitated about three glasses ... more

I had to set up an office on a shoestring. Well, actually it was in what used to be my sitting room but you know what I mean.

One of the things we needed was a plain paper fax. I used to have one of those giant toilet roll jobs but that was very inconvenient with long documents and kept getting jammed up. Anyway, we bought one of these machines and it has sat between me and my partner in crime for about eighteen months. Now I will be truthful. I wasn't intending to write about this machine and had resolved that today I would just read what others had written and keep my mouth shut. But I have just had an experience with this machine that prompted me to write.

It needed a new cartridge. Have you ever noticed that the ink always runs out in the middle of receiving a fax? Funny that...

Now, I've changed a cartridge before on this machine. It only took about half an hour and neccessitated about three glasses of wine before I could speak civilly to anyone again. So I was not looking forward to it. But today, we didn't even have a spare cartridge. So I was reduced to REWINDING THE OLD ONE. I have just sat here for ages twizzling the knob on the side of the rollers and watching the carbon paper stuff go round. And I have realised what a wasteful system this inky stuff is. You see there is a roll of carbon-type paper that rolls over the face of the paper that is to be printed. And the letters or whatever are printed through it. But even if nothing is printed, for every page of A4 an A4 bit of carbon goes through even if only to print one line. I expect that is a feature of every fax machine of this type but it did give me a surprise when I realised it. (I'm not very technical - did you guess?)

So about this machine.

It's really quite good as long as you can manage to be out of the office when the cartridge runs out.

Here are the features:

It has several mode settings so it can be a dedicated fax or set to pick up calls after so many rings or just on manual. Ours is always on fax only so I don't know how efficient the others are but this mode works a treat and it only demands regular top-ups of inky stuff and paper to keep going apparently indefinitely.

It has a useful copy function that saves you going downstairs or next door or wherever to the photocopier for just one sheet although that probably uses up the carbon quite a lot, come to think of it. The blurb says it can enlarge and reduce as well and although I have never actually done that deliberately, sometimes strange sized documents have been faxed to us and have been reduced to fit A4 automatically which is a 'Good Thing'

It has a good number of pre-sets for numbers that you ring frequently

It has two useful sliders that enable you to send a non standard size document without causing a huge jam.

It has been very reliable and goes almost unnoticed in the office, which is always a good sign for a machine, I think.

If you do jam it up (and any jam is usually caused by the user rather than the paper feeding mechanism) it has a very simple method of opening. You pull the front down and push on two obvious purple levers to spring the thing open. Then you can remove anything stuck in the rollers or change the cartridge.

I didn't realise, but I see from the blurb that there is a facility for sending a fax to several destinations which I don't need but you might find useful if you want to circulate minutes or whatever by fax.

Ours is in a sort of 'computer' greyish/beige colour but a darker charcoal grey one is available.

The overall fax

If you are not very technical and want a basic fax with useful functions for not a huge price then this is a good buy. I am not sure at this distance what we paid for it but the current Viking catalogue price is £159.99. We have never had to ask the manufacturer for any support because it has been so reliable so I have no information about how good they are.

Changing the cartridge is not really difficult but can be fiddly if you are a bit unsure about which way up things go and not too adept at holding rolls of carbon into the plastic carrier. It is also very easy to be really dim and throw away an essential part when changing the cartridge. What you have to do is to make sure that you get the ends of the old rolls off and insert them in the new rolls, including the white and blue knurled knobs. There is a diagram which I am told is perfectly clear and helpful to people of normal intelligence and which is very sensibly placed clearly on the bit that you are working with, so any problem is not really the fault of the machine.

This machine has done sterling service for us for a good length of time without demanding anything other than routine feeding and the occasional kind word.

Price:
 

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