Panafax UF-770i suffers from difficult installation routines
Pros and cons: + Can save long-distance charges in some cases + High-quality fax machine – Difficult to configure using standard documentation – Cannot handle e-mail attachments Panasonic's Panafax UF-770i gives more than just the fax. The high-end fax machine can transmit not only over ordinary phone lines but also via the Internet, circumventing long-distance charges. But there are a few glitches.
Pros and Panasonics Panafax UF-770i gives more than just the fax. The high-end fax machine can transmit not only over ordinary phone lines but also via For one thing, its not really free unless the UF-770i transmits to another of its The UF-770i must be assigned an e-mail address to receive Internet faxes. It captures But standard fax machines dont have e-mail addresses, so you must buy a UF-770i As a backup, you can also fax documents to anyone who has an e-mail address. The Even with those limitations, the fax machine would be worth its considerable weight if Documentation was substandard, to say the least, and the process of configuring the The UF-770i does not accept a standard e-mail address, so in the domain gcnlab.com, we Panasonics tech support staff advised that the fax machine needed its own domain. What the UF-770i actually needed was a subdomain. Once configured as Finally, I happened to glance at the accompanying press materials, which contained a The UF-770i cannot read mail attachments and will garble plain-text or other On a whim, I tried sending a fax from the UF-770i to an invalid e-mail address, knowing As Commonly used numbers or e-mail addresses can be stored for repeated use, which is Although the idea of free faxing is terrific, installers without technical savvy will Considering the installation difficulty plus the machines substantial $1,969 On Panasonics General Services Administration Information Technology Schedule
cons:
+ Can save long-distance charges in some cases
+ High-quality fax machine
Difficult to configure using standard documentation
Cannot handle e-mail attachments
the Internet, circumventing long-distance charges. But there are a few glitches.
kind over the Internet. For sending to ordinary fax machines, it falls back on standard
phone lines. A standard phone jack and a 10Base-T network card are at the back of the
unit.
and prints e-mail sent to the address just like a normal fax sent over telephone lines. In
theory, if you disliked reading text on your computer screen, you could route all your
e-mail to the fax machine and receive it neatly printed.
or compatible Internet fax machine for each location to enjoy free faxing.
recipient will need a TIFF viewer, which Panasonic provides free on its Web site.
it were not so difficult to set up. The GCN Lab staff spent three days getting it to work
properly on the lab network.
mail server to work with the fax machine was convoluted. Even Panasonics technical
support line could give only partial information.
could not set up the fax address as fax@gcnlab.com. The setup manual was fairly good at
describing how to set up the hardware but virtually silent on how to configure the mail
server.
I assumed they meant the fax needed its own top-level domain, something I did not want to
give it.
fax@ifax.gcnlab.com, it came online. Setting up the mail server was largely trial and
error, though.
step-by-step description with picturessomething that was not in the documentation.
attachments. You must send the entire message in the e-mail body.
it would bounce back. After a few seconds, a message told me the fax did not go through,
but then the UF-770i tried to print its TIFF file, which came out as four pages of black
lines. Ironically, it could not recognize its own file.
a fax machine over ordinary phone lines, the UF-770i works just fine. It prints receipts
when messages are received or sent, so you can verify when they were transmitted.
helpful because the machine uses an alphabetical keypad instead of a standard QWERTY
keyboard.
have a difficult time. And even then, the technology has a way to go. Panasonic should
include a floppy disk for configuring a mail server to work with the fax machine. A
graphical interface would be helpful on the server side.
price, you would have to send a lot of Internet faxes to justify choosing this model over
a standard $300 fax machine.
contract, you can pay an extra, and worthwhile, $96 for installation of the UF-770i.