Falling prices have helped to maintain the fax's popularity.
"The fax machine you would buy at Costco or Staples 10 years ago for the home office would typically cost about US$200," Fountain said. "Better machines are available today for US$45."
The US$200 machine a decade ago would have been a stand-alone fax. Now, Hewlett offers the Fax 1050 -- a combination fax, copier and answering machine -- for US$99.
But faxes priced at US$100 and less can have at least one drawback: they typically transmit and print at a rate of only about four pages a minute. More money buys more speed, among other things. One business model from Sharp is the FO DC525, which costs US$3,000 and transmits and prints 20 pages a minute.
Commercial machines are available for mass faxing of more than 100 pages a minute. But the prices of such machines can reach US$70,000, and they are usually more the size of mainframe computers than office machines, so you won't find them in the fax aisle at Staples.
All of this has come too late to benefit the fax's inventor, the Scottish physicist Alexander Bain. He patented the first primitive fax machine in 1843, some 30 years before the telephone. Called the "recording telegraph," Bain's invention used a stylus attached to a pendulum, which passed over metal type to sense light or dark spots on the plated "document" being sent. A pendulum on the receiving device made a stain on chemically treated paper when electric charges were sent on a telegraph line. But Bain's innovation came nearly 100 years before the Information Age, and there was little demand for it. He died poor.
Bain might have been mortified at one problem with today's fax machines: their vulnerability to their own version of junk mail. Junk faxers can tie up machines and delay important messages, and some critics label them thieves.
"They can steal a lot of paper from recipients who don't even want to get their ads," said Lawrence Markey, a lawyer at the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights in Santa Monica, California.
He started suing junk faxers in 2001, in California small-claims courts. Such litigation is painstaking, he said.
"I have collected about US$5,000 so far from various companies," he said, "not nearly enough to compensate for my time."
One plus, though, he said, is that junk faxers don't seem to be dialing his number as often.
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