HP 640 Inkjet Fax Machine

This fax machine has a cheap price, but doesn't disappoint in quality. Even though it is made of plastic, it is sturdy enough to give you assurance that it won't break down in a week. This fax doesn't get much use, I only plug it in when needed. Since I don't use it as a telephone, I didn't have to deal with setting up an external answering machine, although the instructions to do so seemed pretty easy. The fax has a few different answering settings to choose from, depending on how you use it most. All in all, I am pleased with the machine and the copying feature has come in handy for me.

I think this fax machine is wonderful and very user friendly and it great addition to my computer room. It has been used alot since it was purchased and is a big help to me for sending and receiving ducuments that would otherwise be e-mailed with attachment or the regular mail that takes more time.I'm my mother's POA since she became ill and still am even through she is getting better,but,I do the bulk of her financial things. This is a great fax machine and I wish I purchased one before it would have made things alot easier.

My wife needed a decent fax machine for her business but, because her fax volume is not very high, she didn't want to spend hundreds of dollars on a high end machine. We thought this one would be perfect. We could not have been more wrong. This machine has been nothing but problems. First, the print quality was poor from the first day but, since it was cheaper than other fax machines, we were willing to put up with this. Then, one of the settings to have the machine automatically answer an incoming fax didn't work. It simply never picked up the incoming calls. We had to set it to the manual setting, where we have to pick up the phone ourselves, determine that the call is fax, and press the fax button quickly to tell the machine that the call is an incoming fax. This was annoying, to say the least, but we were able to work with it.Then, after just a month, the machine started producing only blank white sheets of paper, both for incoming faxes and for copies. After hours on the phone with technical support trying one thing and another, we were told that the problem must be a clogged ink cartridge, which they said, "can happen", even though it was only four weeks old and had hardly been used. At our expense, we had to buy a new $25 cartridge and that did resolve the problem, though it made us wonder how long it would be before the new one clogged.A while later, the fax machine started only producing half of an incoming fax. If the incoming fax was 10 pages, it would only produce the first five pages or so. There was no error message and no indication anything was wrong other than the fact that the second half of the faxes were always missing. When the faxes were sent to a neighbor's machine, they came in fine. Finally, on the outbound faxes, recipients started saying they never received the faxes, even though the machine claims the faxes were sent. When we sent the faxes from the neighbor's machine, they went through fine.This fax machine now sits unused because it cannot be relied upon. We are using the neighbor's Brother fax machine until we get our own Brother. We certainly won't be getting an HP again, as this was a complete waste of money.

Review of the HP 640 FaxFirst, let me say I am a fan of HP, or at least was until Carli Ferini, whats-her-name, ran the company into the ground.All of my computers, printer, laptop, camera, etc., are HP. They have outstanding customer service which led me to choose them.Since the HP All-in-One (One for all?) machine died completely after only 2 years, I bought this HP 640, wanting a simple, easy to use, inexpensive Fax machine.Well, it was inexpensive. It certainly is not simple nor easy to use, six months later I still cannot get it to work properly.The directions, 66 pages for god's sake, are confusing and contradictory and at least in one case, flat out wrong. You put the copy to be faxed face down, not face up as they say in the directions.I cannot get the machine to work in conjunction with an answering machine, unlike the two previous fax machines I have had over the years. It simply won't do it. Either it butts in on telephone calls or doesn't answer when it should.At last I got it to stop printing out a confirmation sheet after sending a fax, here again the directions are contradictory and confusing.Hopefully, this model is discontinued, in case it isn't I wanted to save anyone else from buying one like I did. I won't buy another HP when this quits.Why do these people feel compelled to add feature upon feature to a simple product when all I want it to do is to send a damn fax? The programming of this takes hours, literally hours. The options and tricks are apparently endless, even in this inexpensive machine.My first fax was a Panasonic which worked faithfully for ten years until a cross country move drained the electrons. Now I am on my second one in a couple years and not satisfied with it.Just like these new cell phones which take a master's degree in programming to use, who needs them? All I want to do is send and recieve a simple fax, in English, not French, German, or Japanese; now, not at 2:30 in the morning on the coast.For god's sake why do they make this complicated junk? I guess because we suckers buy it unknowingly.