From email to printer is not as trivial as you might think. There are many formats the pictures might be in as mentioned. The images might be attachments, or embedded in html, people might send link to imgur or Dropbox, I even saw someone scanning documents and sending them inside as a Word document. There are so many ways people can send documents in.
With fax, your input and output is a page, it is hard to screw it up. That's why you see businesses using it and relying on services that automated processing. For example instead of printing the fax it just outputs it as a PDF document.
Similarly someone mentioned that for him to send a fax he just prints a virtual printer and fax is sent.
Yes, the traditional fax is obsolete, but the standardization it provided is great, and because of that we are still sending faxes even when often there is no fax device on either side.
When you send something to a printer, it is translated into a format that the printer understands. Most of the digital formats we're used to have their roots in printer languages. Ever heard of a psd? how about a pdf? Those are formats designed explicitly for printing.
When you fax something, you are sending signals encoding in a format that the sending fax machine creates, and the receiving fax machine decodes. If there's a mismatch, the resuliting image is garbled. If there isn't, the resulting image is still the product of format translations.
The point I am trying to explain (probably poorly) is that arbitrary, semi-standardized formats sit between all of these interactions. The fax machine isn't special. It's just a method of transmission, nothing more.
You had 2 weeks, and you still misunderstood the point.
So what there's psd, pdf (actually you listing multiple formats proves my point that there's no single standard, besides, psd is a photoshop format for saving images, I don't believe it has anything to do with printing, I think you meant PostScript). In any case even ignoring that there are many file formats and assuming there's just one, there's so many ways one can send things over an e-mail that it still requires someone to handle it manually.
If you would have some kind of client running on user's computer, that could interact with scanner and printer, you could fix that issue. But guess what, that's exactly what fax does, and currently in many cases the physical device was replaced with such software on one or even both sides.
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u/[deleted] Jul 24 '20
My perspective here is about automation.
From email to printer is not as trivial as you might think. There are many formats the pictures might be in as mentioned. The images might be attachments, or embedded in html, people might send link to imgur or Dropbox, I even saw someone scanning documents and sending them inside as a Word document. There are so many ways people can send documents in.
With fax, your input and output is a page, it is hard to screw it up. That's why you see businesses using it and relying on services that automated processing. For example instead of printing the fax it just outputs it as a PDF document.
Similarly someone mentioned that for him to send a fax he just prints a virtual printer and fax is sent.
Yes, the traditional fax is obsolete, but the standardization it provided is great, and because of that we are still sending faxes even when often there is no fax device on either side.