yost@DPW.COM (David A. Yost) (10/30/90)
I bought an Orchid fax, which comes bundled with BackFAX, and I'm not thrilled. For instance, randlom lines of pixels are dropped when printing received faxes, although if you copy and paste the image into a paint program, they seem to be there. When you send a fax, the rasterization drops and adds raster lines so that a 45 degree line sort of zigsags about every 1/4 inch. Also, when sending a fax, if you preview it on the screen, a 45 degree line jags along at something a bit off 45 degrees. The upshot of these weirdnesses is that lines of text appear randomly tall and short when printed. There are other annoyances. A major one is that when you want to use the modem for dialout from another application, you have to furst go into the backFAX application and take it out of send and receive modes by hand; of course, when you're done dialing out, you have to go back and re-enable backFAX. If you don't do this, you get ugly error messages and the modem may have to be reset. AppleLink in particular realy freaks out in this situation. Is this a problem with BackFAX or is the Mac serial driver too dumb to support automatic switching in a case like this? Is this any better under the the Comm toolbox? The way it should work is that a client waiting to answer the phone should not interfere with another one that wants to dial out. It took years for unix serial drivers to support this automatic line sharing, but now most of them do (I put in a change like this once myself). Anyone have the Abaton Interfax? Is it good? --dave yost yost@dpw.com or uunet!esquire!yost Please don't use other mangled forms you may see in the From, Reply-To, or CC fields above.
kaufman@Neon.Stanford.EDU (Marc T. Kaufman) (10/30/90)
In article <2759@esquire.dpw.com> yost@DPW.COM (David A. Yost) writes: >I bought an Orchid fax, which comes bundled with >BackFAX, and I'm not thrilled. [description of annoyances] >There are other annoyances. A major one is that when >you want to use the modem for dialout from another >application, you have to furst go into the backFAX >application and take it out of send and receive modes >by hand; of course, when you're done dialing out, >you have to go back and re-enable backFAX. If you >don't do this, you get ugly error messages and the >modem may have to be reset. I have the Abaton Interfax modem. It automatically switches from fax mode into 2400 baud conversational mode when I bring up Versaterm, then switches back into fax receive when I exit. The picture quality is good. The problems are: VERY slow conversion of fax to print when printing on a Laserwriter II NT -- the spool files are so big that I have to turn off background printing if I have less than 4 megs free on the disk. Also, the INIT that runs things sometimes causes the machine to hang (Mac IIx, system 6.0.5, Multifinder 6.1b9). Marc Kaufman (kaufman@Neon.stanford.edu)
briang@bari.Eng.Sun.COM (Brian Gordon) (11/01/90)
In article <2759@esquire.dpw.com> yost@DPW.COM (David A. Yost) writes: >I bought an Orchid fax, which comes bundled with >BackFAX, and I'm not thrilled. > [...] >Anyone have the Abaton Interfax? Yes >Is it good? Yes. Not perfect, but good. I bought it when the 4800/1200 baud version was their only one. When they came out with the 9600/2400 hardware and new S/W upgrade to go with it, they sent the upgrade S/W free. It does the job, is EXCELLENT at both sending and (auto)receiving FAXes in the background under Finder. If I had the money, I'd spring for the 9600/2400 hardware today. As a home unit, I can't justify that (yet). -- :-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-: | Brian G. Gordon briang@Sun.COM (if you trust exotic mailers) | | ...!sun!briangordon (if you route it yourself) | :-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:
Bruce.Hoult@bbs.actrix.gen.nz (11/21/90)
In article <2759@esquire.dpw.com> yost@DPW.COM (David A. Yost) writes: > The way it > should work is that a client waiting to answer the > phone should not interfere with another one that wants > to dial out. It took years for unix serial drivers to > support this automatic line sharing, but now most of > them do (I put in a change like this once myself). I agree that this is a problem with BackFax. Timbuktu/Remote manages to share the modem in a nice way, so it obviously *is* possible.