Ricoh UK Ltd has launched a Group 3/Group 4 laser facsimile machine for the ISDN-2 market, and says that it is aimed at highvolume users. When in Group IV mode, the 7000L transmits an A4 page over a digital telephone line in one and a half seconds. In Group III mode, the 7000L transmits an A4 page in 10 seconds. Ricoh says that because Group IV is seven times faster than Group III, customers that use facsimile a lot, sending upwards from 100 pages per day, can save considerable amounts on line charges. But a fax machine can be used in Group IV mode only where the end-to-end transmission is over digital lines, so both facsimile machines have to be capable of Group IV and hooked up to ISDN. Feltham, Middlesex-based Ricoh reckons there are just 10,000 Group IV machines installed worldwide, most of them in Japan and the US. However it optimistically believes that this number will treble by the end of the year. If the 7000L meets a Group III fax machine at the transmission’s destination, it switches to Group III, lengthening the transmission time and reducing the quality to ordinary Group III levels. The 7000L has a 20Mb hard disk memory, from which the messages need to be sent to achieve the fast transmission times. The disk can store 1,200 A4 pages and there is a digitiser that enables pages to be transmitted to be fed into the disk memory at the same time as outgoing or incoming transmissions are taking place. The machine uses plain paper rather than the usual expensive thermal paper roll, and in Group IV mode, the resolution is 400 dots per inch. There is also capacity for one-touch number dialling of 50 stored numbers. The Group IV version of the facsimile machine costs UKP13,000 but it can also be bought for UKP11,000 for use as a conventional Group III machine only, and later upgraded to Group IV for UKP2,000 when more people start to use digital lines and Group IV.
