Panasonic KX-FPG381 Plain-Paper Fax and 2.4 GHz Cordless Phone Combo

If you have a high volume of faxing, then this is not the machine you want. I only get one or two faxes a week and this works great for me. It distinguishes between phone & fax calls perfectly. The only con is that the battery life in the phone is weak. I thought I had a bad battery so I bought another one (only about $12)and after installing it, realized the problem still existed. The handset obviously uses a lot of juice.

Another reviewer noted that the fax uses up its ink-roll quickly --- I agree. I get a couple of junk faxes per week and that makes the machine unneccessarily expensive to own. The batteries in both handsets died after 1 year and it cost me $36 to replace them. One of the handsets seems to have gone quietly insane over the past year. It arbitrarily loses contact with the base (even when sitting next to it) and it now happens so frequently that I have to replace it. Perhaps if I had been paying more attention to it I would have noticed the onset of the handset's dementia and taken it to a doctor in time. Oh well :-(

The Panasonic KX-FPG381 Fax & cordless phone combo appears to have been a good decision.

PROS:
1. It accurately distinguishes between fax calls and voice calls.
2. It allows the phone to ring up to from 2 to 7 times (selectable) before triggering the answering machine.
3. I added an additional telephone and was able to add it without any trouble.
4. Good, clear telephone reception
5. Lots of convenience features that you'll quickly depend upon
6. Selectable tones reduces the irritation of hearing the phone ring
7. Faxing out is simple (just enter the phone number and hit send). An automated message tells you whether it was sent OK or not.
8. Receiving faxes is automatic (do nothing, just read your fax).

CONS:
1. The manual is the only drawback I can see right now. Its obviously written in a foreign language and then translated into
English. If this isn't the case, then Panasonic should have hired professional technical writers to produce the manual (not the engineers - they can't write directions to make pop-corn).

OVERALL
I consider it a good buy and a good price when you consider you're getting a quality cordless phone system and a fax machine at one price.

Well, that's my opinion so far. If it changes, I'll update this.

I read the reviews above - who the heck talks 4 hours on their phone??? If you're looking for a cordless phone/fax - then this is a good one

Panasonic needs to dump this style of fax machine - the ones that use that cheesy film - like carbon paper only really really expensive.

I had the older model this unit and I can't really fault much about it except the cost of the film and the way it uses the film. It basically feeds inch by inch film to paper. What his means is when a fax message is blank or has one line it still uses an entire page of film.

When your film is finished you may used 20% of the potential of the roll. You can't rewind so you have are stuck with shelling out another $25 for a roll.

I just took mine out of service in favor of a SHARP unit that uses an inkjet cartridge. It's too soon to tell how long it will last but the starter cartridge has already done more than 300 sheets and still going strong. The entire unit cost me the same price as two rolls of Panasonic film.

The cordless phone is fine and works well, but the battery could stand some improvement.

Panasonic needs to stop making these film based machines or at least re-engineer them to feed film only when printing.