I tend to use electronic appliances until they die – squeeze every drop of life out of them. On my desk, I used to have an old Brother fax machine (the kind that used the roll paper), a Canon copy machine, and an Hewlett Packard 6L laser printer. And they all took up a lot of room. Now that everything is fading and dying slowly, I decided that instead of paying at least $200 to replace the toner (for the Canon copier and the HP printer), I should just splurge on a fancy new multi-function machine, and clear-up some desk space while I’m at it.
So I picked up the
Panasonic KX-FLB751 at my local Costco. After doing some research on the net, I decided on a laser machine instead of one of the many inkjet combo machines, mostly because I already have an ink jet printer. And since most of my work involves generating text-based documents, I thought a laser-based multi-function machine would be the most cost-effective choice.
Another reason I liked the
Panasonic KX-FLB751 is because it comes with an attached handset, while most machines of this type don't. I find a handset useful when dialing with a calling card to send my faxes, which I use for sending international faxes. This isn't a necessity, because you can usually attach a separate handset to any machine of this type. But it's still a nice feature.
Panasonic KX-FLB751 also has a caller-ID reader. I didn't use this function because my machine was hooked up to a dedicated fax line which had no caller-ID service. But it would be useful for people who have just one phone line.
COPYING:
The document feeder is noticeably slow. I haven’t sat around timing every page as it goes through, but it seems to pause for quite a while after every page. And although I don’t copy hundreds of pages every day, it was slow enough for me to notice.
Another drawback is that although I can adjust
sizes when making copies, I can’t adjust the
contrast (making my documents darker or lighter). That’s a pretty basic function for a copy machine, and it’s astonishing that this machine doesn’t have it. This is a major flaw.
The biggest flaw, though, is that the copies just look terrible. Even with a crisp black-and-white source document, the copies came out looking noticeably spotty and distorted. I was really disappointed at this. I think the problem was that the machine seemed incapable of distinguishing any kind of gradation in the color – i.e., the gray part. Later comparisons to other machines of this type (such as the
Brother MFC 6800) showed me that this shortcoming was not typical.
SCANNING:
The manual says that the
Panasonic KX-FLB751 can scan images in color at up to 1200 dpi, but using the software that the machine came with, I was not able to scan anything at more than 300 dpi, and was only able to scan in black and white. Since I didn’t intend to use this machine as anything but a text scanner for OCR conversion, it didn’t matter to me. However, the machine didn’t perform as the package/manual said it would, with the software that came with the machine. This is another significant drawback.
I have found, however, that scanning documents and converting them to text using the included OCR software was satisfactory.
FAXING:
Well, the faxing was excellent – except that there isn’t much to it, really. It sent and received clean faxes – and what more does one need in a fax machine? But again, like with the copying, the document feeder seems to work very slowly.
PRINTING:
The laser printer output was satisfactory. It made crisp print-outs of text and pictures. The clean output of the printer function also confirmed that the muddy copies were not the result of a dirty printhead or a toner mishap – the copy function of this machine just seemed defective.
Conclusion:
Basically, I realized after using the machine for a while, that the
Panasonic KX-FLB751 is
primarily a fax machine, and
its copy function also works much like a fax machine – hence my inability to adjust the contrast or get crisp copies. The result is more or less like making copies with a standard dedicated fax machine – your copies look as good (er, bad) as your faxes. This was very disappointing.
Because the copy function of this multi-function machine has significantly below-average copying standards, I eventually decided to give up on this machine and try another one. Although the faxing and printing is satisfactory, it is unlikely that most consumers who want a multi-function machine are willing to live without crisp copies. (In fact, you can easily buy a machine that will fax and print
without a flatbed copier for much less, so why pay more for this one?) And after trying other multi-function laser machines in the same price range, I discovered that the bad copy quality of this machine is not typical.
And the slow document feeder was a problem, too. Another constant problem was that I seemed to get a lot of paper jams. Every machine jams once in a while, but the
Panasonic KX-FLB751 seemed to jam more often than it should – both in the paper supply AND the document feeder. For example: after I fed a 10-page document into the feeder to fax or copy it, I couldn’t walk away and trust that it had gone through – no matter how crisp and even the pages were. There would be a jam more than half the time, even though I took care to make sure both the source document and the paper supply were evenly loaded, crisp, and fresh.
And because this machine is quite slow, it was not fun waiting around monitoring it. Since I’ve replaced this machine with another brand at the same price, I haven’t had the same problems, so I can only conclude that the
Panasonic KX-FLB751 is inadequate.
Overall, this is a below-average machine that I do not recommend. I’ve had mostly good luck with
Panasonic products in the past (DVD players, cordless phones, etc.) and considered it to be a reliable brand. But I was very disappointed by the
Panasonic KX-FLB751.
