EEVblog 1587 - Dumpster FAX Teardown 

In the healthcare industry faxing is alive and thriving as it’s a hipaa compliant way of communicating. Most offices use e-fax but some still have an old school analog fax like this one.

Many public offices, doctors and lawyers still make regular use of fax machines here in Germany. Not as common as in the 2000s, but still enough that it doesn't stand out to most people.

Unbelievably FAX machines are still alive and well in Japan. A good bit of the IT industry in Japan is equally archaic.

We still use a FAX machine. I have a CPA office and we still receive FAXs almost every day. They are a secure way to easily send payroll and tax information.

I used to do a lot of work with a metal bashing firm in Birmingham - they used to sketch a drawing on paper and fax it to the bloke up the road with the CNC punching machine - this process was really rapid and efficient - for a shop floor environment, I can't imagine how you'd achieve the same thing as easily today (phones don't produce a conve nient disposable paper copy like fax did).

33.6 is pretty quick once you've put up with 9600 or less. The slow tick of the thermal paper creeping it's way out of the machine must be familiar to quite a lot of us.

The fax machine predates the telephone! They're a wonderful episode of The Secret Life of Machines by Tim Hunkin.

I use a fax as a backup means of serving papers on other attorneys, since many still have them. I had another lawyer claim he didn't receive certain papers served via email. I'm allowed to do "backup" service via fax. I could also mail them, but he gets an extra 5 days if it's served by mail. Fax is treated the same as email (but email is still required).

Keep the linear rails (rods). Comes in handy when you need something really flat to judge the flatness of surfaces etc.

Funny story - I work in the CT department of a hospital. The booking office receives imaging requests electronically. They print the request, fax it to us down the hall. Then they stamp "faxed" on it, make a photocopy, keep one for their file, give the other to the radiologist. So we use the full print/fax/copy capability of the machine to accomplish something that should not require any paper at all

Still come across faxes in the healthcare/insurance industry here in the US. Hate the damn things but make a decent amount of money thanks to the damn things. I'd bet the USB port would let you hook it up to a computer to use it as a fax modem, remember that being a thing for a long while too.

Those neon bulbs are gas arrestors, they protect the line in from lightning strikes. The centronics port can be used for printing, sending a fax from PC or updating the firmware. Faxes are still heavily used in doctors and lawyers offices.

OH NO! You forgot to take out the heater-fuser lamp AGAIN! ;) Those are thin long glass lamps that are pretty fun to look at. Even playing with them is fun: although they are 240 or 120V rated, connect to a standard 30V lab power supply and get a nice warm glow.

Hey this particular model is still found in may mailbox/ship places that you pay to send and receive faxes at least here in the U.S....pretty good machine as long as the pickup rollers/separator pads are good...good unit...I still know there is faxing going on...the Brother version here though does have a USB port for laser printing also.

I like having both options, fax and email. Sometimes emails just don't arrive or get filtered to whatever the email provider deems fit.

Old big printers usually have good cables (Canon, IBM, Xerox). So ripping all the wires is a good idea, they are useful for many projects and repairs.

Really enjoy those types of videos! I could watch this all day!

I spent years working as a Brother tech repairing these machines. Certainly didn’t dismantle it the way you did 😂 Most common issues where the power supply triac would fail stuck on and burn out the rollers on the fusing unit. And the bearings inside the laser scanner would dry out causing noise and eventual failure

I work in the printer repair industry and I will say that a surprising amount of companies still use fax. A lot of doctors offices and doctors still use them, as well as a bunch of random businesses.

Many restaurants (e.g. Chinese takeout) still use fax machines. Also, a lot of weather bureaus/stations actually broadcast weather reports via radio fax. I can receive weather forecasts from New Orleans via shortwave radio (4316.1, 8503.1, 12789, or 17246 kHz) for example. I have yet to receive weather faxes from Australia (signal is very weak).

I can still remember some of the fax numbers I used to dial every day in the 90s even now. Fax is still used in the National Health Service in the UK because there are so many paper-based records still and it is supposedly quicker to fax them than scan and email and print on the other end.

this is the same machine we had in our office, online and working up until a year or two ago when we retired it and deactivated the phone line.

I used one of these for many years for mostly printing using the centronix port. The DIN is for another paper tray connection.

Merry Christmas happy holidays Dave, all the best bro 2024 massive

In Germany you'll find a lot of fax machines as well as typewriters, still in use.

So, in the pandemic, many of the local health offices sent their infection counts to the minister of health via fax here in Germany. I think especially in government administration, it's still the highest technology available.

back in the late 90s early 2000s I worked for the original eFax company.We did bulk faxing for car dealerships, banks etc. It worked great for a while. Then people figured out you can bulk fax from windows with a USB or printer port connected Fax. Or if you never need to scan or print the fax, just a modem. The company SOLD ITS NAME to some startup to buy it some time, but it was gone by the next year.

lol, the freedom of tearing something like that apart with no intention of ever putting it back together.

crazy how some old electronics had such complicated physical builds.multiple small fixed function processors, fpgas and such wired together on multiple boards. the amount of gearing screws and such. I've seen some machines that use multiple gears and solenoids so they use the same motor for many purposes. that's why electronics was so expensive back in the day, 80s and early 90s electronics was way more expensive than now. now everything just has a small computer chip and an lcd display in a hunk of cheap plastic

The Fax machine and clear schematic diagrams have never been compatible. Thank God you ripped it to bits Dave.

NMB is one of the best fans in the biz.👍

I've worked on these for years, as well as other brands, Brother is one of the most well known and used small fax machines and longest lived, it was easy to find generic supplies for it and they worked well. Of course I used a different method for disassembly and service, to get to the main machine you had to removed the Auto Document Feed assembly ... these were built up HL-1240's and have been around 20 years or so, many offices still have them because they never seem to wear out. The omly thing that eventually killed then is if the spinning laser motor failed.

Many older 36 inch wide engineering drawing scanners had 4 or 5 scan bars from Fax machines. The sensor bars were physically not all in line but but they buffered them so recombined like one linear array. One i used on the early 90s was like that. All Dos based with a window like interface. To align it in service mode you electronically input an offset. When older one of my early 90s scanner would have one 8.5 inch bar intermittent. Bad caps. So replaced caps all the time. Kept it aways on and that halted its decline.

When I used to work for a big telco company a decade ago, there was a fax machine and used a few times a year for some special important/safety/secret messages. And in the beginning of the 2000s Father had one of those fancy memory fax receivers connected to the computer. It did not have a printer, just a memory and you could download and display it in the computer.

Here in germany they are very common because the internet is for all of us uncharted territory.

Finally NOT a pool teardown video

I started my small business after graduating in 1995. I never really needed a fax machine, but did setup some kind of fax facility on my then Windows 95 PC using my standard landline number. It didn't really get used very often and then I bought a little OfficeJet print/scan/fax thing which again rarely did any faxing but was used to scan and email things. So, given all that, I'd say that I didn't really use fax in the latter 90's. Early 90s, I was still using electronic typewriters, photocopying and sending important things via snail mail. The most important thing (invoices) hand written in Biro on WHSmith duplicate invoice pad and posted!

Our best sales person in our company is the fax machine

My family business finally retired the fax this year, we were still receiving 30 to 40 faxes a day until we pulled the plug. As already stated the health care industry still uses fax and as a mobility parts supply business it was painful to try and convince the customer base to change to email and online ordering

"Does anyone still use these?" Yes, apparently. I have a fax machine still plugged in, if only because it's got my answering machine built into it - and I still occasionally get fax spam. I don't imagine they'd still do that if there weren't enough people still receiving them.

The last time I used a fax was when I was doing all the paperwork for starting a job at a large aerospace company in 2011....one that manufactures nuclear weapons just down the road and also making avionics to keep commercial aircraft from crashing into mountains or each other. Would have thought that a company required to meet such high technical specifications would have stepped away from fax machines ages ago. Obviously, I had to go down to the local print/ship shop to send it.

I worked on the fax software on the Nokia 9210. Amazingly you could send and receive faxes from a phone.

Fax co-existed with email for a long time, and still does! I had a fax in my office until about 2010 - I had a certain number of customers who loved to fax in their orders, so had to have it.

Way back when I remember using a PC to chlog up the fax machine at a radio station way back in the 90' 😁 Who listens to radio nowadays 😂

Faxes are still used in banking. They are considered more secure than standard email. They can be used to instruct all sorts and its not out of the ordinary for a signed fax to be used as authoriisation to make cash payments of millions of $s on a daily basis. Banks have obviously tried to move away from faxes but its still the primary method of instruction for a lot of firms, even for firms that have moved to contemporary authorised electronic instructing will use fax as a back-up method.

Brother still makes the absolute best monochrome lasers, and they're still available with fax. Anyone that doesn't *need* color for a home printer should absolutely go with a Brother, you can't go wrong.

I last used a fax machine when we bought our house in 2016. Had to send all of the signed application paperwork to the bank via fax. It was that or mail it. We have a fax in our office because we have the need to use one maybe once a year.

I had a similar toner package in a regular laser printer Brother HL-1030 if i remeber correctly i think that toner you could put a piece of tape over the cartrigde and it worked for over an year more

Haha that thing looks like my Brother 1230 Printer except the Fax on top. It is already about 20 years old and it is still working fine. So I can use your toner :D

Even now i do get the random "If you can't email the details,send a fax." for government papers.

This looks VERY similar to my Brother HL-1230 laser printer from the same era, that I still use to this day. I think they just took the same laser printer and added some parts to it to make it a fax machine. Same centronics connector and everything.

Even the old thermal paper fax machines used to have a copy function on them (10-15 years before this modern laser type). They only worked for single pages of paper, not for books (no glass platen; just a roller feed)

Earlier this century, and in the precedind decade, there was a strong overlap in technologies with snail mail, fax, email and EDIFACT, etc with direct (business) document data exchange. One of the many things that I did was to "bolt on" a document distribution system onto legacy systems. Loiking like a printer to the legacy system, it'd reformat the document according to recipient requirements and queue them for delivery by the appropriate means. Staff would still need to pick up a stack of paper documents for snail delivery but all else, including faxes, happened "by magic".

I can tell you that most government departments and public hospitals in Australia do still use fax, and I know because I have to rely on the public systems to live as I am too disabled to work.

When I was a military meteorologist, we had one for things like when an embassy flight was in the middle of nowhere Africa, and internet was unavailable. I had to fax their weather papers to a random African number. I only had to use the fax machine once, but it's a lifesaver when nothing else is available.

When Dave is finished with the tear downs, his 4 rubbish bins are over full 😅

I'm pretty sure we had a very similar model at work, and we did hook it up on a HP JetDirect to use it as a network printer

The ultimate classic fax that I know of was the NEC Nefax. Inesctructible.

1 man's trash is another man's treasure 😂

Early 2000s they started to be phased out. With the notable exception of doctors offices and lawyer firms.

Whoa, your tool is so much longer than mine! And I thought 20cm is something... did I call it a screwdriver? THIS is a screwdriver. Fax machines were used here well into 2000s, 2010s even. Nowadays it's pretty much obsolete tech. I still remember the FSK (if I'm correct) tones when I called some business on the phone but reached the fax endpoint, haha.

When I started my current job at 2008, we still did use a fax machine for receiving schematics and floor level plans from the designers. Many of which were old scans from 80's and 90's paper stuff, or some handwritten drafts etc. Rarely we sent anything back. But of course by that time mostly everyone just used email. Project banks and such had not yet made a breakthrough. But mostly what came out from that Canon fax-machine were ads from office supply chains etc. Last landline (ISDN) at work was terminated just somewhere around 2018, when our now large worldwide corporation decided that it's too expensive to keep it alive. We still had the original phone line from 1991 when the building was made and our company moved in, to that point. Now it's all fiber optics. The desk phones are still connected to the base station, and you can make internal calls if you wish, but no calls to the outside world anymore. Nice trick to confuse some of the young players, by calling to their desk, where phone is still in place. All the alarm & remote use stuff was replaced with GSM-modems and TCP/IP (comserver) where possible.

i had to install 1 a few weeks ago for a dr!

It reminds me of the smell of cigarettes. In the 90s when people smoked in the office i used to go from the workshop to the office to fax quotes and the heat of the fax used to make it stink of cigarettes

Legal, Medical and Real Estate still use those here in Canada. Mostly for signatures.

I don't have the fax machine but I do have the printer that they stuck it on top of. They put a blanking plate on the front where the printer status lights would normally be. Going to have to argue that Brother stuff was really good at that time, the laser printer portion of this machine certainly wasn't particularly good.

Amazingly not a printer but only so they could charge more for the print enabled version. It wasn't long before "all in one" machines became the norm and no company in their right mind would sell a machine at this level with the print function disabled, but for a time, it was presumably more profitable to create artificial segmentation of products. I remember the TN6600 well from my days "remanufacturing" toner cartridges, before it was cheaper to buy Chinese generic alternatives. Brother mono toner cartridges are quite unusual in that the waste toner is sent directly back into the cartridge with the fresh toner. It's kept separate by means of electrical charge but if you run the toner too low (like if you tape over the toner level sensing window) the waste toner will eventually get back into the system where it will cause grey "backgrounding" all over every page. The waste toner will then contaminate the drum unit, so even if you change the toner to a fresh one, you'll still suffer from backgrounding. In the case this happened, both the cartridge and the drum had to be replaced or cleaned. Only changing one meant the cycle would continue. Back in the day, we had to very thoroughly clean out the cartridges before refilling them. If anything more than a gram or two of old toner remained, you ran the risk of having backgrounding when you put the toner back in. We also had to thoroughly clean the transfer roller and "adder roller" inside the cartridge for the same reason. It was also a nightmare trying to tell customers to not cover up the toner sensing window and explain to them that the 80g or so of toner left in the cartridge was bad waste toner. We even had a customer march in with a jar full of toner he had decanted from the cartridge after the machine said it was empty, absolutely convinced we were ripping him off. We invited him to buy a genuine bother toner and see if he fared any better. He came back with his tail between his legs a few weeks later.

Still in use at my work place. Some oldtimer still thinks, the fax is much more reliable, in case the Internet connection goes down... My estimate: Fax machines will still be around in 60 years or so.

One place such things hung-on, was Construction sites; the contractor having maybe only a phone line or two as temp works, and before project hosting extranets took off (or, the on-site guys had bandwidth -for). I sent my last fax as an Architect supporting the on-site construction team, c. 2005 (UK) - where they were located, utterly-ruled-out higher bandwidth options. Worked well - and there was a certain simple joy to receive a 4pixel potato-print, be able to use a marker to circle things , scribble 'Effing-no-way', and bounce it back ;) I even 'issued for Construction' details merely scribbled on Post-It notes, taped to an A4 page, run it through the drum... ...something about the daft , low-res interaction that somehow this amade me smile. & Of course - today - I merely shoved 1GB+ of finely -granulated BIM data out to our partners, because that's the now, business -as usual; which I prefer!!

We still have fax at me work, it just combined into the all in one printer which are brother ones

My GP used one yesterday to fax a prescription to the chemist

I sent a fax yesterday!

The lenses are for keeping the laser beam round from left to right.

A lot of businesses do still use fax here in the US, even my small business lol

Our hospitals in Province of Quebec still uses Faxes

Here in Germany all government offices still use them. But they are getting less over time. Some courts and lawyers still use them I think.

I barely ever used one. I used to send timesheets back to the office via fax late 2000-2001 but not that many times. My smartphone had fax (Nokia 9110i).

I was just in Sydney and St. Vincents Hospital still do use fax. If you have an appoitment wan wish to change it says send your fax to .......... I am not sure how many households have a fax machine

I'm a Network Engineer for a fairly large financial institution in The 'States, who also handles telephony requests from the users. Still, today, in December of 2023, I get requests from users for new POTS fax lines. I can't help but laugh.. About a decade ago, I had a fax line in my office for the desktop dudes to use and routinely someone would leave it plugged in after using it. Come back a few days later and find hundreds of spam faxes for cruise vacations and car warranties... Five years ago I'd finally had enough and deleted that line from the phone system and trashed the fax machine.

Looks to be based on the HL1440/1450 series printer, of which I have one dating from 2000 in daily use here.

Don't think they are used any more here in Sweden. Haven't seen one used in years. I believe there was still one hooked up in the local university just a couple of years ago, but it was ripped out last year.

Very common use here in America for medical labs. HIPPA compliant communication for offices that don't have some kind of encrypted paid email service.

My first IT job has a ton of hp lazerjet 2 and 3's, all broken. I spent hours rebuilding into functional ones. PC LOAD LETTER! Lol I've been a croc repair person, fixed probably every brand printer, fax, in existence. My part time employer uses them, health care, the US just can't get off the stupid things. As the sysadmin for a higher education school, I helped (with my network engineer) to convince everyone, and did away with all but one fax machine, just in case. Brother mfc's are all I'll use anymore. And almost all fax machines could be used as really bad copiers. I have late 80's brother, Panasonic, and Epson ones in a hole somewhere around here.

It's called an All-in-one printer, fax, copier. Stull used in many industries to send confidential information with a false sense of security. Also that round connector was Apple's older pseudo serial network connection. The Centronix was in fact a printer connection.

Until a couple of years ago I worked for a major copier/printer manufacturer, our machines had copy, print and scan as standard with fax as an option if needed (a lot of healthcare/doctors still use fax! (not uncommon for idiot customers to stick the phone connector into the network port and then complain that the printing didn't work!)

My Pensioner mum bought herself a Fax/telephone in the 1990's - I don't think she ever sent a single fax, although she did use the photocopy function- which was abysmal. Cost her around £100 which was a stupid amount for a phone then! (Photovopies were 10p in the Library or Post office on a proper full size A4 sheet) !! Bless her.

🖐 Yep, I have an attorney that requires some items faxed (both ways). But, my fax runs on a google voice line run through a Polycom ObiHai connected through Starlink internet. I'm rural and don't have land lines. That's NOT a parallel printer port???

I was just in the middle of watching your hyperloop video and it went black screen "video unavailable" . I'm guessing some bogus copyright complaint, haha.

Still popular in the trucking industry in the United States.

for stupid legal reasons in Germany they are far from obsolete... look it up its a thing. Greetings from Berlin, Germany

Fax machines are alive and well in the Canadian healthcare system.

Still have a fax machine at the hotel i work at. Its how we recieve crewfax reservations. And a crapload of advertising somehow.

Amazon still has a ton of FAX machines.

when the fax's used paper rolls, we would send 40 or 50 blank pages. they when very fast and cut the paper roll in to a lot of nice A4 sheets. boy would the end user get upset. 🙂 Maybe sometimes we would say we were just sending them a few A4 sheets to use as note paper.

Faxing in Japan is still mandatory for most official communications. I was surprised they never made Internet connected fax machines, where they start calling each other on the phone, exchange ip addresses and encryption keys via phone, and then just dump the data encrypted over the Internet.

I'm in New Zealand and just this week Mc Donalds ran a promotion where you fax a number and they fax you back a QR code for a free Kiwi Burger (The idea being the reintroduced Kiwi burger is taking you back to the early 90s)

Hate to break it to you, Dave, but in the feed direction US Letter is actually wider than A4.

Interesting,, im in NZ and of the 1980 mold.... far more familiar to me are printers that also 10:32 send faxes .... I'm sure I sent a fax about 10 years ago

Yes legal professionals and pharmacists apparently, at least in the US as far as I've heard, regulations not keeping up with technology....

you can probably build the world's most precise 3D printer with so many cogs and rails...