Our little business has a business phone line, and a business fax line. This situation necessitated our getting a fax machine. I pooh-poohed the fax machine as an antiquated technology and scoffed at the idea of us ever needing to use it. Well, was I wrong! Over the past few years we have faxed a LOT. We also make a lot of copies, so a multifunction printer made a lot of sense. We started out with a cheap ink jet model that lasted a few months before dying. We upgraded the next time to a better ink jet (but still kept the price under $250). That one lasted a bit longer before it, too, bit the dust. Our next ne was a step up – a Brother laser multifunction. This one actually made good copies. But they all shared a common problem: to use the scanner, you had to hook the printer directly to a computer. So networked scanning became our holy grail. Our second Brother laser multifunction died recently (I was standing beside it, talking on the phone and for no good reason I lifted the lid – and it broke off in my hand!). So rather than get another so-so model we decided to shoot the moon, and bought a Xerox Phaser 8560 MFP.

It came with many bells and whistles, and also came with a great warranty (something that none of the Brother printers had *sigh*). Good thing, as the printer, which was supposed to be a duplex printer, wouldn’t do any double-sided printing, and the document feeder was also a non-starter. A very nice repairman came over  twice with many parts before finding the  problem – they had  put the wrong configuration card in the printer! After that somewhat bumpy start, the printer is off and running, and we have achieved home office nirvana: we can scan and send the scans to any of our networked computers! And we can also printer in glorious phaser (imagine many tiny Jackson Pollacks in the printer furiously hurling bits of ink at paper with flawless perfection) CMYK color. It’s very cool. It’s also allowed us to downsize and sell our old ink jet printer and our scanner. Even better!