UX-510 PRINTER RIBBON

Sharp UX-510 Review

Overview:

Thermal transfer printing is a method seen in fax machines such as the Sharp UX-510 which, using this unique process, produces hard copies of incoming fax material in a somewhat efficient manner. The UX-510’s most notable feature is its compact size, as its performance and cost per page specifications are consistently lukewarm at best.

Pros:

The Sharp UX-510 comes equipped with a built in fax page memory capacity. The amount of included on board RAM totals half of a megabyte, or about 512 KBs. With this amount of memory, the unit can safely store both incoming and outgoing fax material in data form without actually printing or transmitting the material. With half of a megabyte in memory available, somewhere between 27 and 30 pages worth of data can be stored.

Having an on board fax page memory is critical for keeping outgoing and incoming material safe in a variety of circumstances. In the old days, incoming faxes had to be printed as they were received or they would be lost forever. If there was a paper outage or the thermal cartridge ran dry during the middle of an incoming fax, users were out of luck. Page memory can safely store a fax of considerable size while paper is restocked or consumables are replenished.

Though the Sharp UX-510’s print resolution is quite poor in quality, it is actually quite good in comparison to other fax machines, as faxes are usually sent in low resolutions. The print quality for the machine is measured horizontally and vertically; the vertical resolution being a constant 203 lines or 8 lines per mm. Vertical resolution is adjustable between three settings, each of which will change the print speed when in use.

Standard resolution rests at a barely legible 98 lines per inch. Standard resolution should only be used for the most basic of faxes that are very clear to begin with. A fine/halftone quality can be selected to achieve 196 lines per inch, while the unit’s super fine resolution of 391 lines per inch is the device’s highest setting. The display on the unit itself also carries a measurable resolution of 7 x 5 dots per digit in a 16 digit single line.

Cons:

In an age where the Super G3 33.6 Kbps fax modem has become the concrete standard, the Sharp UX-510 offers a measly 14.4 Kbps modem in its stead. Having a modem that operates at less than half the speed of machines in communication with the device poses a variety of problems. While most other fax machines will be “clocked down” upon communication with the Sharp UX-510 to accommodate for its sluggish speed, this causes both parties to wait more than twice as long for faxes to be transmitted.

Transmission speeds of 14.4 Kbps result in a fax time of about 6 seconds per page. While this means that single page faxes will only take 3 or 4 seconds longer to transmit than they would when using a better machine, the time it will take to send or receive a larger fax project will compound quickly into full minutes.