Most of us have pretty bad relationships with printers—you need it once or twice a month, usually just to print off a label to return something that didn’t fit. If you do own a printer, you should know that printers can do a lot more than just print the occasional return label—many printers can send faxes too, multi-function printers in particular (also known as all-in-one printers). These are printer models that can handle printing, scanning, copying, and sometimes even email and faxing.
Faxing From A Printer – How It Works
Not every printer can send and receive faxes. Printers generally come in two types: single-function, which are printers that can only print and therefore are generally smaller and cheaper, and multi-function, printers that can do more things like scanning, copying, and faxing, but are bigger and more expensive.
In order to fax documents directly from a printer, you’ll need a multifunction printer with fax capabilities. These are more advanced printers that contain an internal fax modem, which connects the printer to a Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). The printer can then function as a dedicated fax machine, converting, compressing, and modulating your documents before transmitting them as audible tones over the phone line to the receiving fax machine. Some more advanced printers can fax over IP (known as FoIP), which essentially uses the internet to fax—you can do a deep dive into that here if you like, but it’s more common for large corporations and is unlikely your home printer will be able to do this.
These printers can receive faxes in the exact same way they send them, whether over a phone line or over IP, and most printers will automatically print received faxes or send a notification to the host computer.
Step By Step Guide – How To Send A Fax From A Printer
The process may change depending on which company has manufactured your printer, but if you’ve got access to a fax-enabled printer, you can send a fax by following the steps below.
1. Check your printer
Before you begin, you should check a few things. You’ll need to make sure a telephone jack or connection is plugged into the printer so that the fax modem is connected to the landline (if you’re using FoIP, check the printer is on the same network as your internet). You won’t need to print anything in order to scan and fax documents, but some printers annoyingly will not operate at all unless they have ink, so check the settings on your printer to make sure it’s happy.
2. Place your documents in the input tray
Most multifunction printers have either a tray that automatically feeds the scanner or a scanner glass you have to place each document on as you scan. If yours is the latter, then you will have to scan each document separately, but for more expensive printers, it will load and scan each document for you.
3. Open the fax menu on your printer or computer and enter details
You can use the printer control panel or the printer software on your computer to perform this step. If you’re using the control panel of an Epson printer, select the ‘Fax’ option on the home menu, and you’ll see the following screen:
All printers will have a similar menu, but using this as a reference, you can manually enter the recipient’s fax number on the printer, or you can select a recent fax number or one of your contacts. On the printer control panel, you can navigate to ‘Fax Settings’ to customize your fax—e.g., whether to send in color or black and white, what size the document is, or you can schedule the fax to send at a certain time.
If you’re using an Epson printer to fax using the computer interface, you’ll see a menu like this after selecting the print command:
If you select, in this example, “EPSON (FAX),” you’d then see a window like this, where you can enter the fax number and other details for your cover page:
Review and send.
Check details such as the recipient’s fax number and area code, preview your scanned documents, and when you’re ready, press the send button!
4. Get a fax report
One of the great things about faxing is that you always get proof of delivery with a fax report—unlike e-mail, where you’re relying on the recipient to confirm. You can use your printer control panel or computer software to view the transmission history and fax reports of all sent faxes to check they’ve made a successful delivery and print them for safekeeping.
5. Receiving Faxes
Most printers with a faxing feature will automatically receive and print incoming faxes; however, you can change the settings to stop faxes from automatically printing and instead receive a notification on the printer or your connected computer.
How Many Printers Can Send Faxes?
So how many printers have fax capabilities? To get a general idea, we can look at some of the top printer companies and see how many of the printers they are currently selling offer fax capabilities.
- Epson Printers
Epson’s website, at the time of writing, lists 220 different printers for sale, 45 of which can send faxes. About 1 in 5. - Canon Printers
Canon is currently selling 112 printers, and 23 of them can send and receive a fax. Again, about 1 in 5. - Brother Printers
57 out of the 135 Brother printers currently on offer have fax capabilities. About 2 out of 5. - HP Printers
Only 20 out of the 160 HP printers for sale support faxing out of 8. - Xerox Printers
Half of the 14 home office printers for sale on Xerox’s site can fax.
Out of these 5 popular printer companies, around 24% of their printers can double as a fax machine.
Should You Use A Printer To Fax?
To start with, there are 2 obvious problems with faxing from a printer: nobody owns a printer anymore, and nobody owns a landline either. Okay, fine, that’s not literally true, but let’s look at the numbers:
Printers
The Washington Post thinks that around 45% of Americans own a printer. Millennials and younger generations are less likely, but let’s go with this number—it feels about right. However, a large number of these will be basic printers, not multi-function printers that support faxing. Let’s follow the numbers above and assume that about 25% of all household printers offer fax functionality—this gives us a guess of 11% of people owning such a machine.
Phone Lines
Around 40% of households still have a landline connection, according to YouGov.
So who has a printer and a phone line?
Technically, it isn’t anybody. But simple math on the numbers above (11% x 40%) gives the average person a 4% probability of having both a multi-function printer that can fax and a phone line—and therefore the ability to send faxes from a printer.
So—if only around 1 out of every 11 people have a printer they can send and receive faxes from, what are the other 10 people supposed to do?
There are other issues with faxing from a printer:
- Cost—Printers that can fax are very expensive—the cheapest ones are usually at least $100. Then there’s the ink (this is where the printer companies make the big bucks!), paper, and of course, maintaining a landline connection with a phone company. A simple online faxing service is much cheaper and more flexible.
- Convenience—With a printer, you’d need to have access to your printer—so you could only be at home or at work. You’d also need physical documents to scan, and the entire process can take a while. With a fax app or online faxing, you can simply scan the fax pages on your phone and fax from anywhere in the world.
Faxing With An Online Fax Service
In this day and age, you are far more likely to have a phone, a tablet, and/or a computer than you are to have a printer capable of sending faxes and a phone landline installed. The good news is that you can use any of these items to send and receive faxes, and you can do it in a much easier, cheaper, faster, and more convenient way than spending an hour battling the printer.
Here are a few great alternatives to faxing from a printer:
- Using a fax app
iPhones and Android devices have a range of faxing app options that allow you to easily take advantage of your phone’s connection, camera, and technology to send high-quality faxes—all from the palm of your hand and at a fraction of the cost of an expensive printer. You can check out the best iPhone apps here or the best Android apps here. We recommend Municorn’s range of fax apps—they’re the best service, and you get unlimited faxing. - Using an email-to-fax service
There are also services that allow you to send or receive a fax using your email account, such as EveryFax. You simply sign up, and you can do all your faxing straight from your email inbox on whatever device you prefer to use. Any fax pages can be added simply by adding them as attachments to your email. This technology combines the convenience of email with the security and protection of faxing. You can read a more thorough guide here. - Using a fax machine
Of course, an obvious way of faxing is by using a physical fax machine. If you exist in 1997 and are somehow reading this from the past, then you may have one of these at home. If not, do not fear; you can actually use a fax machine from quite a lot of places—for example, stores like CVS, UPS, Walmart, USPS, Office Depot, or FedEx. You might also be able to use your local library.
Sending Documents From Your Printer Without Faxing
There are far easier ways to securely fax documents than by using your printer, but if you really insist on sending documents with your printer, there are some other ways to do it.
For example, many modern printers can send files to network folders, an email server, an FTP/SFTP site (file transfer protocol), a SharePoint server, or other areas of a home network you’ve created. Alternatively, printers can sometimes interact with cloud-based services like Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive and can send scanned files to those services. One example of this is Brother’s Web Connect feature, but other manufacturers will have their own ways of doing this.
It’s important to remember that this is not faxing and doesn’t offer the same security and protection that faxing from a fax-capable printer does. For example, faxing is HIPAA-compliant, and therefore gives you much more protection handling and sending sensitive or confidential documents and gives you more rights over your data security. You can read about why faxing is so secure here.
Online Faxing: The Best Way To Fax
If you want to avoid an expensive bill and hours of time fighting with the printer, get a fax app or online faxing service today and start faxing in the easiest, cheapest, highest quality, and most convenient way possible today!
