Too-Cheap Laser Fax Loaded with Problems
Written: Mar 18 '05
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Product Rating:
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Pros: It is small, light, and inexpensive for a laser fax.
Cons: Jams all the time. Hard to clear jam; I damaged $100 drum doing it!
The Bottom Line: For low-volume use, get an inkjet fax. For higher-volume use, you need a laser fax, but not this one. It's too cheap in all ways.
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| alaskautah's Full Review: Panasonic KX-FL501 |
Remember the Yugo? For $4000 you could buy a car that seemed to be as capable as ones selling for two or three times the price. It was small and cute, too. But it was loaded with problems, needed lots of maintenance, failed in ways that no car should, and didn't last.
The Panasonic KX-FL501 Laser Fax is the Yugo of laser faxes.
We bought ours 18 months ago. It is now history. While I have owned some good Panasonic products, this is not one of them. Be smarter than me and don't buy it.
The machine has two basic design flaws:
Flaw One: The printing paper feed from the slanted tray often feeds two sheets at once. This of course causes a jam. But the machine was designed as if it would never jam--you cannot get good access to the paper path when you open it up, there are no paper-release levers, and you get toner messes if you remove the drum/toner tray to try to improve your access. We are using top-grade (Xerox) copier paper of standard characteristics and 20-lb weight.
Flaw Two: The laser printing engine has been miniaturized to the point where it's like a toy. Where most small printers use a single cartridge, this one has a separate toner cartridge ($40) and drum ($100). The toner cartridge is tiny; it is rated at 2000 pages but has not given us half that. (And nearly all of what we receive is double-spaced text without graphics.) And the drum has to be replaced with every third toner cartridge! The point of getting a laser fax instead of an inkjet is lower cost per page, but an inkjet would be cheaper than this has been.
Problems started the first time I replaced the toner. The toner cartridge is a cylinder about 1 inch in diameter and 8 inches long. You remove its seal and drop it into place with the opening up. So far so good. Now you rotate it using the tab on the right, just like the picture, till the toner opening faces down into the drum tray. OK. Now you close the machine lid. Whoa, it won't close!
At first I did not realize it, but I was in deep trouble. I had not pushed hard enough while turning, so the cartridge had not gotten into the right groove. It is a very easy error to make because of the design; there's no warning anywhere; the manual's pictures are inadequate; high force is needed. All right, why not just rotate it back the way it was to begin with, line it up again, and do it right? Guess what--the cartridge had dumped lots of toner just where it was supposed to go, so you could no longer push down into the groove. An hour, lots of swabs, newspapers, dirty hands, and dirty clothes later, I had fixed it by spooning out and discarding a fair amount of the costly toner so I could properly install the cartridge.
As we used the machine, paper jams happened far too frequently and often when someone was not present. When paper jams, the fax goes into memory. Unfortunately, you have to power down to reset the machine after a jam; do that and you clear the memory, losing your fax(es). But we had bought the machine, so we put up with the problems.
A little over a year after buying the machine, it got into a state after a jam that even power-downs did not clear. Panasonic gives you a tech support 800 number, but it is only good for a year. After two tries and some pleading, a tech gave me the "secret" Factory Reset code which should have been printed in the manual. That finally cleared the machine.
A week ago, only a couple of months into a new drum and toner, yet another jam occurred. The paper was pulled out of the machine as usual. But now there was a white area without text across the page in two or three places on every copy. It turned out that the simple task of removing the paper had scarred the drum, rendering it useless.
Instead of paying $140 for new toner and drum--about half the cost of the machine--we just bought a real laser fax. It cost us $695 but it works right and should last a lot longer than 18 months.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
alaskautah
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Reviews written: 4
Trusted by: 0 members
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