As a Realtor, I send & receive faxes frequently. I have my standalone, scanning fax machine set to use the super-fine resolution mode always, since most documents are either legal ones with fine print or drawings like surveys with fine lines. Quality is more important than speed, especially since incoming faxes are often signed and faxed back and forth several times and they can get hard to read.
A typical legal page takes about 1-2 minutes to send, but today I just sent 11 pages to a Kinko’s not far away, and each page took about 10 minutes to send/receive, less for the less-dense ones, so the image detail must have been a factor. 1.5 hours for the whole thing!
Then when Kinko’s sent 2 pages back, it only took a few seconds, and the mode looks hi-res. (None of the pages in either direction had photos.)
So why did my outgoing faxes take so long this time only? Was there something on the receiving end that slowed things down?
I would try it again… as an experiment. I bet there was a line connection issue that caused the baud rate to drop to really low. Not low enough to drop the connection… but almost that low. As far as what would cause a connection to degrade like that I couldn’t tell you…
I wasn’t thinking a “degrade” issue, but maybe a handshake or protocol issue, since it was regular and steady, not fluctuating. (And there was no storm in the area, it was being transmitted only 150 miles, no hint of line trouble anywhere else, etc.) WAG: Maybe the Kinko’s machine is set to use a protocol my machine has trouble with or vice-versa, and they fell back to a default? My fax is probably about 3 years old; I assume Kinko’s has the latest equipment, so that seems odd.
I can’t easily try exactly the same thing, since I don’t even know which Kinko’s office it was. But I just tried a test, sending one of the same dense pages from my fax to my office, and it took less than 90 seconds! (The exact timing I don’t know; I didn’t use a stopwatch, just kept an eye on the clock’s minute “hand”.)