Fujitsu Europe Ltd has harvested the first fruits of its OEM agreement with Menlo Park, California company Jetfax Inc (CI No 1,610). The FaxJet plain-paper facsimile receiver, which has been available in the US for 18 months – though Fujitsu had no shipment figures to hand, has been re-engineered for the UK market, which the company perceives to be big. Fujitsu will be offering the system for UKP800, somewhat cheaper than forking out for some of the UKP2,500 dedicated plain paper fax machines on the market. The FaxJet receiver can be installed either on a separate phone line to the transmission machine or connected to use the same line. It hooks up via a parallel printer port to a LaserJet-compatible printer, which Fujitsu argues is on average under-used. The receiver can be installed at any stage between the phone line and printer. It also frees an existing thermal office facsimile machine to send faxes. The standard product is Group III-compatible and has 1Mb of memory, upgradable to 4Mb, so up to 240 pages of faxed material can be held in the buffer store if the laser printer is busy or switched off. And up to three FaxJets can be connected to one laser printer, each one connected to a new phone line. Among the features of the FaxJet is the option to take up to five copies of each page, reducing incoming faxes to A4 size if necessary. The fax receiver will be marketed via Fujitsu’s dealer network, to known users of thermal fax machines – Fujitsu sees this as a way of hooking users into its other products.
