You can find a range of fax machines that are available in the market today, but the basic work of all fax machines remains the same - that is to send and receive documents, using plain paper. The output looks very similar to a printout.

Today, the fax machine has advanced features, such as answering machine, telephone, built in voice mail and can also distinguish between voice calls and fax mails. Another important feature seen in today’s fax machine is the ability to work as a scanner too.

In present times, most fax machines come with an inbuilt scanner thereby making it a machine with multipurpose capability.

The most important things to look for in a fax machine while buying one is the number of pages it can hold in the tray and its speed. Check whether it has features like delayed delivery or not and also find out the cost and availability of its accessories.

The best way to choose a fax machine is to determine what your requirements are in terms of capacity and quality. Then you can compare models from various companies and look into the different features provided by them in terms of usage before arriving at a decision.