Talk:Fax
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[edit] Very old comments
The alternative histories on this need to be reconciled! Mark Richards 21:31, 14 May 2004 (UTC)
How about some information on online faxing and fax servers that many businesses are using these days to send and receive faxes.
I understand that the fax machine was developed by the Japanese, as the teletyper machines could not be adapted to their script. Is this true?
[edit] Only covers electronic faxes.
The fax is far older the then the electronic fax in this article. It came out the same time paper for thermal printing did. The first faxes were not digital. Basically a sensor was synchronized with the print head on a remote machine and the head printed when the remote sensor detected a dark part of the page.
- I know what you mean; I remember coming across an article on the history of analog fax technology back when I was an undergraduate. However, I don't really have the time or energy to do the research and dig up the citations, especially since I'm trying to think of a better way to clean up the Lawyer article (I suggested the current breakup of the article now in progress and then someone else went and did it all wrong). --Coolcaesar 02:59, 9 September 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Redirect
Why does facsimile redirect to this article? While facsimile is the root of the modern word fax, it would be worthy its own article. Just think of facsimile reproductions of medieval books! That type of facsimile has nothing at all to do with faxes! Lupo 08:44, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Proposed merge of Facsimile in to this article
- Oppose The two are different. Faxes are so called because they make a facsimile of the document being transfered, and as the Facsimile article makes clear, books are occaisionally published in facsimile editions, whihc have nothing to do with fax machine. WLD 11:42, 15 June 2006 (UTC)
- Neutral, leaning to merge. I would think that if there was a merger of the articles that "fax" would merge into "facsimile", if only because "fax" is derived from "facsimile" and the latter is the precursor to the former. Agent 86 18:51, 23 June 2006 (UTC)
- Oppose. I agree that the two are different. Facsimile is a more general concept in publishing while fax is the shorthand name for a telecom device that drew its name from the larger concept. --Coolcaesar 03:17, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
- Oppose. Fax is about the technology; facsimile about the term from which the former derives its name. However, as things stand, facsimile looks more like a candidate for moving to Wiktionary. I've "stubbed" it, which may help. --JennyRad 23:39, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
Over a month later, the clear consensus is not to merge, so I'm removing the merge tags. 213.94.241.138 11:01, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
Hi guys sorry i just **had** to update the image to a 'modern' fax machine :D hope every1 likes it
[edit] Fax article
I found this article in an old Australian magazine called MAN, from the July, 1949 edition. The article is by Ray Heath, and constitutes the science section, I didn't finish copying out the article but this is the bulk of the relevant section and the rest is mostly concerned with imagining the ramifications and future developments of this technology. But I found it interesting, especially in regards to the information on this wikipedia article, for it's early date, it's claims that the technology was being utilised commercially in this fashion, and the fairly detailed descriptions of the technology. I'm not expert in the subject myself but thought that it might be useful to someone in regards to expanding this wikipedia page.Number36 04:01, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
News Is Still Hard "Fax"
A gramophone machine in the corner of the lounge can print your own private newspaper faster than you can read it.
In the U.S.A. (Yes again) you can get a newspaper delivered right into your living room without the newsboy putting his muddy boots onto the carpet. You can lift up the lid of your radio, and there it is.
It is about a quarter the size of your usual newspaper; it is complete with headlines, photographs, comic strips, and all the whirligigs that go to make a newspaper of today -only it happens to be a newspaper of tomorrow -the "fax," which is short for "faximile," which is a trade name for a facsimile, or a complete reproduction of a "master sheet." It is, like most things in this modern age, a radio production.
Actually you start the ball rolling by investing 500 dollars (£A165) in a home Facsimile set. This turns out a radio reproduction of your newspaper for a cost of four cents (about 3½d). The trade believes that soon radio-minded Americans will buy the home newspaper machine for 100 dollars (£A35) and get a single copy for a penny.
Each page of the Fax takes about three minutes to be printed in your own home : but your don't have to wait. The receiver turns itself on and off, and, unlike any conventional newspaper which has four or five editions a day, you can have an edition of Fax hourly, if you feel that the news is as good as all that.
The biggest appeal is to convenience: you don't have to wait for the newsboy to call; you don't go down to the newsagency; you don't get your paper left out in the rain until it's too sodden to read. When you want it, you just walk into the living room and get it.
Next appeal in this age of swift-moving is that you get the news hours faster. You might sit down to breakfast at 7:30 and casually read in your Fax about something that happened in town half an hour before -and even see pictures of it happening.
This is the sort of modern radio-engineered miracle which is happening now in the United States. There are citizens who get their news this way; who can, if they like, get a newspaper an hour.
To Australians today it reads much as stories of television used to read and still read. We used to regard television as one of those scientific dreams for Sometime. Now we realise that English and American homes enjoy the amenity, while we are just planning to do something about it.
Fax seems to be as far off now as television seemed to us twenty years ago, when it was a fairy word.
But fax is fact to many Americans. The well-known Philadelphia Enquirer has its "Facsimile Edition" carrying in the "ear" of the front page "Broadcast over WFIL/FM." It looks like something run off on a roneo, with radio-photographs. It is easily read.
In the States they do not believe this is a body-blow at the newspaper industry. It was a body of newspaper and radio interests which in 1937, began experimenting with radio facsimile for sending news directly into the home.
The method they have now evolved, and which works now in the U.S.A., churns out four pages in a quarter hour; the pages are 8-inches wide by 11½-inches deep. An edition of the Philadelphia Enquirer contains front-page news, sports, woman's page, comics, advertisements.
In appearance the job is good; and it looks like a newspaper. But the resemblance ends about there. For the reading matter of a Fax is not set in metal type, and there are no metal blocks (engravings) made of the photographs. Typists copy out the news on electromatic typewriters, which produce lettering which looks like newspaper printing. Headings are set from individual printed letters and jointed together with transparent Scotch tape. Headings, reading-matter and photographs ate pasted down on the page -and that's your newspaper, made up and ready to be sent into the home! All the mechanical processes between writing the news and taking the newspaper out onto the streets are eliminated in the Fax edition.
The pasted up page of the Fax is taken to the broadcasting station and then put on a scanner (transmitter). The electric eye of the scanner runs over the page, which revolves on a drum. Electric impulses are sent out across the ether, and these vary in power according to the density of the ray reflected. In short, the pasted up newspaper page is "televised" -not onto a television screen, but onto a "negative" -a photographic, sensitised paper.
At your end, in your lounge room, no presses rumble. A roll of paper, specially sensitised to pick up the impulses of the transmitter, unrolls in your living room recorder, and passes through two thin metal bars. When the signals from the transmitter arrive, they flow through the top bar, through the paper, to the bottom bar. As they flow they take small fragments of iron iron from the top bar and deposit them on the paper. These iron fragments fall into the patterns of the letters, headings, photographs -and in between them leave the white space of the background!
- Here's a similar article from the US: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,794158,00.html —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.79.161.1 (talk) 12:24, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
[edit] fax security
Fax communications cannot be hacked,
OK, that is an absurd statement. How about something more reasonable. Such as, "less susceptible" to interception. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 192.153.24.120 (talk) 23:54, 11 April 2007 (UTC).
[edit] Belinograph
Might be worth mentioning this word specifically, since it's used (admittedly in passing) in the original novel version of Casino Royale. 86.132.137.0 22:29, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Doubts about this article - History section
There are apparent inaccuracies in the History section. I can find no reference elsewhere to "the Xerox Qyx in the mid-1970s," Qyx was an electronic typewriter made by an Exxon subsidiary. Also, I find no other source for "mechanical movement of a pen or pencil to reproduce the image on a blank sheet of paper," early fax machines used chemically treated paper, later thermal paper. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.93.60.217 (talk • contribs)
- Should refer to the Exxon Qwip; not Qyx, as that was an Exxon electronic typewriter. ref – Dicklyon 06:17, 5 June 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Color FAXing?
What's the standard for color FAX transmissions? I have a Brother MFC 5440CN all in one machine that can scan (or send from the computer) color images via FAX if the recieving FAX is also color capable.
Standard for color faxing: see ITU T.30 Annex E, look at [1] 322 pages, look for »colour« in British spelling! You’ll find: – » ITU-T Recommendation T.30 was approved on 13 September 2005 by ITU-T Study Group 16 (2005-2008) under the ITU-T Recommendation A.8 procedure.« Annex E (Procedure for the Group 3 document facsimile transmission of continuous-tone colour images) on page 162 of the PDF-document. Fritz@Joern.De —Preceding unsigned comment added by Fritz Jörn (talk • contribs) 07:38, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
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- Hmmm does all seem a bit up in the air as of 2005, doesn't it. Mostly speculative stuff, perhaps over-ambitious also (if I wanted to send a 12-bit, no subsampling, 1200x1200 resolution picture... I'd just attach it to an email, as it'll take about fifteen minutes to send a regular photograph at that resolution and 33.6kbit/s...). Plus my head now hurts.
- Also if I was, as I suspect, the original question asker, I put 'color' as a deference to the presumed-mainly-USA population on wiki... figures the one time I remember to do that I'm linked back to something with British/International spelling :) 82.46.180.56 (talk) 14:54, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Frequency Activated Xerography?
Looking for an answer... Back in about 1995 a junior co-worker of mine arrogantly informed a senior co-worker that "Fax" is shorthand for "facsimile." The senior co-worker replied that the Fax was invented long ago, 1930s or 1940s, and that FAX was actually an acronym for something like "Frequency Activated Xerography." (I don't remember exactly.) Since then I have heard only references for Fax as a "facsimile." Yesterday when I read some instructions regarding an order, I was reminded of this 1995 conversation, as the instructions pedantically stated, "Please send us the information by Fax, which stands for facsimile, to the following number..." Now I am wondering about the true derivation of the word Fax. Could it really be an acronym? Does anyone have an answer? Maureen47 19:22, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
- The Online Etymology Dictionary has it's first recorded appearance as 1948 as an abbreviation of facsimile. First attested use as a verb from 1979.Number36 03:53, 5 November 2007 (UTC)
[edit] What happened to "facsimile"?
Facsimile was used long before fax machines. It was and still is used to reprint books cheaply. --Una Smith (talk) 17:46, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
- Call me crazy, but isn't that the same thing as a fax? I wonder if maybe you're thinking of a memeograph or ditto machine? --Shubopshadangalang (talk) 19:13, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
Okay, I'll bite. You're crazy (just kidding, I'm a nice guy and am not really being confrontational). But I really don't think that the original poster was thinking of just some machine that makes copies. I started a skeleton of an article just to fill the void since so many pages were linking to facsimile and being redirect to the fancy, and almost obsolete, telephone-modem that is the fax machine. It needs some work, but hopefully some experts on the subject will finally take a look and help expand it properly. --Stomme (talk) 08:52, 20 April 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Pre-FAX machines
I just saw the rapidly spinning drum described in the article on an episode of Adam-12 from late '68; they were using it to transmit fingerprints, and the show was pretty good about accurately representing the LAPD. Does anyone know any more about actual uses of this technology? 66.93.12.46 (talk) 03:18, 19 March 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Couldn't find that standard
I tried to look up the standards for digital fax machines. ITU's site doesn't have any note of T.72 at all. Perhaps the list of related standards needs to be checked. (And I know too little about fax standards to do it myself.) TobiF (talk) 06:02, 18 April 2008 (UTC)
advantages and disadvantages needed to be added —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.71.216.91 (talk) 09:50, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Cover Sheet
I couldn't find any mention of fax cover sheets, and Cover sheet covers an entirely different topic. Mathiastck (talk) 20:29, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
