After years of messing around ‘scanning’ my documents using my phone camera, I bit the bullet and shelled out for a document scanner. A Brother ADS-4300N.
It took a while to set up, but now I can load my documents into the paper feeder and it will automatically do double-sided scanning of several pages at the press of a button!
Hopefully instead of hunting around for tax documents that I ‘saved’. I can just scan them immediately and have everything ready for next year’s tax return!
well, congrats, you’ve joined the rest of the world.
It must be at least 2 decades now that all my printers were able to scan as well.
@Phil_MCR I didn’t know you’re German…
One thing I like about Switzerland is the commitment some electronic retailers put on making things simple.
The Brother All-in-One printer+scanner DCP-1610W is great and it’s sold by all retailers. Toner for it will be probably available after I die.
It’s a simple and sturdy workhorse. Electronics should be like this, but we fall for novelty 
I’m a big fan of Brother office equipment. I also had a workhorse HP Laserjet that I thought would last me forever until a mover dropped it
HP, also known as „have patience“
In the end they are all identical under the hood as almost all MuFu‘s (multi Funktion) machines are UPE‘s or universal print engine and built by Foxconn. They just slap their logo on the shell and brand lock the toner cartridge chip.
At the moment I am big with Lexmark which use print engines from Konica, you will find the same PE in Oke, Ricoh, Brother and others, depending on the model.
A lot of countries still use analog and digital fax, including Japan strangely enough.
I still think Fax was one of the coolest inventions ever. I had one at home end of the 80-ies (thanks to home-office when the word home-office didn’t even exist) and bought one myself when I quit working for that company. All one needed was a standard telephone line. ISDN coming up made it even better. The only drawback was the thermic paper.
It kept a long-distance relationship very much alive, being able to send letters to places like India and China and where ever my other half would be at the time. And you come home and have a five page hand-written letter waiting for you which was written maybe just hours before 
I know, it’s all groovy with whatsapp, email etc. etc. but I would not mind if faxes were still used and I had one here. I still find scanning one step too many.
You ate right. There’s something magical about fax. I think it is because you are instantly sending something that is physical. While things like WhatsApp are instant and have more features,they are still digital.
And the stories around them. In India they had these “fax-shops” where you could send off/receive faxes.
One time my BF was back in India and I just sent a fax to the last shop-address I had. It didn’t cross his mind to go back to the shop he used last time when the guy spotted him in the street (and recognized him, a miracle in itself), ran out the shop and told him, there was a fax waiting for him. 
“Our time” had it’s charm which is lacking these days.
And some rely on paper and the postal service.
How many posts have we read on Swiss forums in which the advice is: “Don’t use email, send them a registered letter”.
Anyone using one of these with a Mac?
The one I bought has Mac and Windows support. Actually it works without a computer attached as it can save directly to a USB drive you plug into the scanner and has a network cable that can save to a server. I think more recent models can save to web services like google drive etc.
Thanks. Many of these companies software for Macs are frankly useless. HP is one of the worst. There is some genuine software out there that does the job, but often without the bells and whistles.
Not only magical, but old, really, really old. The first machines that worked on the principle were make in the 1840ties, they developed into the DAH-DAH-DADDIT-DAH telegram to the first wireless telegram in the early 1900´s.
They used a compression that was the forerunner of the tagged image file format or TIFF whereby the image was broken down into black and white information, the one bit tiff.
Incedently the TIFF is still owned by Adobe and has been since the early 1980ties.
This all comes together in your brother MuFo where when you scan an image it is converted to TIFF sand sent to the RIP raster image processor in the printer. Basically the scanner is taking the image, breaking the colors down into four separate pictures and sending them as a one bit fax to the printer unit.
Fascinating stuff.
I guess a lot of people of this forum (and that includes myself) have passed the 50s… does anybody remember also all of the Apache software which allowed to send physical faxes from the computer? --and that was sooo difficult to configure properly…
The marketing idea of fax was being fast. So, thermal paper surely beat those old dot matrix printers.
Also, it meant consumers were hostage of this special paper, which people did not like much in the long-term and alternatives where adopted…ciao fax!
I think the thermal paper is a plus. It is a commodity which can be bought anywhere as opposed to different ink and toner systems which are stupidly expensive.
But thermal paper documents fade over time.
Printer companies make their money via the ink, which is why they go through so much trouble locking their cartridges (they play the same game as on internet - development - hackers - developement - hack…).
That’s also why they sell you a printer for 60.00 franks, it has become the hook to get you a long time ago.
I was wondering how this market will develop now that almost everybody got to the point of keeping documents in their computers. There are still things I print out but it’s obvious I need a lot less ink than I used to, to a point where I don’t even bother searching for best offers/alternative suppliers anymore.
Maybe it’s time we love and pamper our printers as prices for them will go up (still needed for scanning so still no escape) while prices for ink won’t drop.
I’ve got one of those Canon inkjet printer/scanner/copiers and had it for years.
I’ve also got a Brother small b/w laser.
The Laser printer has been playing up - it’s been smudging the paper and now doesn’t do duplex printing so is basically unusable.
So, when I switched to the Canon to print a document, I found the inks had run out and it’s so old I can’t get replacement cartridges (Canon or third party).
I was thinking of keeping the Canon to use as a scanner (it’s wifi so I can put it anywhere) but to replace the laser and inkjet with an inkjet with refillable ink reservoirs.
Does anyone have one of these and have they had any problems with nozzles drying out or quality problems?
