Full Review

Picked up the Sharp UX-300 Fax Machine for about $50 at a local retailer for use at home for the occassional times that I needed a fax machine. While this is not a fancy model, it does pretty good for light duty home use. If you are buying this for office use, you'll want a more heavy duty type fax machine.

About this Fax Machine
This unit operates like a normal fax machine. It's not as quick as the units you might have at work, but does ok. You can use it to fax or make copies.

The fax feature is pretty easy to use, you just put the paper in face down, put your outgoing fax number in and hit start. It feeds the paper in when the other line connects and sends the fax.

Receiving faxes is pretty normal also. If they fax machine is setup for automatic answer, then it works un-attended and prints out the fax upon receipt. If you run out of paper it will store a few pages of fax in the memory and automatically print them when you put more paper in.

Copying is about the same as sending a fax, but you put in the number of copies you want and you can also zoom or reduce the copy size some also. Copy speed is not very fast as it has to scan in the image and them thermally print it out. It does perhaps about 4-5 pages per minute.

Nice Features
If you don't have a separate fax line you can do one of two things. Set up the machine to manually answer a fax if you know you are getting ready to receive on or you can just press the "start" button on the machine if you hear that someone is sending you a fax when you answer. The fax machine will automatically take over.

Or you can use a feature that uses the phone company's "Distintive Ring" feature. You can get a second phone number for your home line that will ring with the "double ring" or "triple ring" patterns and you can set this fax machine to pick up only on those distinctive ring patterns. This allows you to have a separate fax number on your same home phone line and not have to manually answer the fax machine and start it when getting a fax. It also sets the number of rings down to 2 rings if set on distinctive ring so it will pick up before your home answering machine if you are not there and someone calls in on your "fax number". This is a very nice feature and I would not buy a fax machine now without it.

It also has a feature that will allow you to print out a list of the last 20 or so people that have called and the name that showed on the CALLER ID display. While I don't have a big use for this, it would be a good feature if you ever have to use it to show that you've been getting phone calls from a certain number, such as harrassing numbers, etc.

You can also print out a help menu brochure for setting features, etc. if you don't have the users manual handy.

Things to note
This unit uses plain paper, but it does a "thermal transfer" from a paper-width ribbon to print on the paper. What this means is that it heats up the ribbon as it goes along the paper to transfer the fax image to it. This works ok and without problems, but poses a slight "security" issue because anything that has been faxed to you is still "burned" into this ribbon. You can take the ribbon out of the machine and perfectly read past faxes, copies, etc. So if fax printout security is an issue, you might want to consider another type of printout machine. For most people this is fine for home use but they need to be aware that personal information could be revealed by just throwing away this ribbon in the trash if someone else found it. Shredding it or melting it would take care of this though.

Problems:
I've had this machine several years now and it has just started to develop problems. I am only at the start of my "3rd ribbon" so it hasn't seen much use, but it has started having problems with the paper jam sensor. The unit will flash "PAPER JAM" accross the small LCD display after almost every printout now. I don't have a paper jam but it still gives this error. I've tried putting in one sheet at a time to test if it was jamming getting more than one sheet and it still has this problem, so I can guess that it can only be the sensor. Resetting is easy, you pop the cover of the machine open and the cover to the area where the ribbon is and shut both back and it will print the next sheet. It work, but is just aggravating, which is why we replaced the unit with another fax machine eventually. I don't know if other people are having this problem with this model unit or not.

Would I buy it again?
If I needed just a plain cheap fax, then yes. But now days you can get 4-in-one fax/printer/copier/scanners for a decent price and inkjets don't have the security issues that the thermal-ribbon-printers have, so I'd have to lean to another unit because of that. We also did finally replace it due to the paper-jamming-sensor issue and replaced it with an inkjet also. So overall buying one again would just depend on your needs.