Panasonic KX-FHD331 Plain Paper Fax

I bought this item largely based on the two 5-star reviews on this site and of course its very low price. I'm now feeling a bit disappointed.

After setting the machine up, I discovered there are a couple of things I'm not crazy about. First, the unit uses thermal heat transfer, so you need to buy "ink film" instead of ink cartridges. An entire page worth of film gets used every time you receive a fax or make a copy, regarless of whether the page is BLANK or totally BLACK. This can add up to a lot of waste. Sometimes I like to make a copy of something that doesn't take up a whole page, like a shopping receipt, and I'm paying for a whole black page with this machine. (Faxes work out to about ten cents a copy, depending of course on what you pay for ink film refills.)

Second, the used ink film serves as a negative of every fax you've received and every copy you've made. If you receive anything confidential or sensitive, you're going to want to be careful about how you...Read more

When I first got the machine I sent a 1 page fax and it worked okay, so I threw the packaging away. After that every time I send a multi-page fax The pages get stuck & go through together. I use good quality paper & fan it out, but even after multiple attempts I get the same results. Now the new thing is, even when I put the documents in one at a time, some of the pages don't get acknowledged and I get an error message. I tried calling the help line but they don't have weekend coverage. Now I'm trying to figure out if I'm better off sending it for repair, or just throwing it in the garbage where it belongs and trying again with another make and model. I really don't know if this thing is worth any more of my time. Take my advise, stay away from this machine. By the way, this machine doesn't deserve close to one star, but they don't have zero stars as an option for the rating.

Easy to setup. But the copier quality has become extremely poor right after several uses. The copy printout is not readable. Not recommended.