FACSIMILE:

Fax, in full facsimile, also called telefax, in telecommunications, the transmission and reproduction of

documents by wire or radio wave.

The process by which a document is scanned and converted into electrical signals which are transmitte
d over a communications channel and recorded on a printed page or displayed on a computer screen.

Fax (short for facsimile), sometimes called telecopying or telefax (the latter short for telefacsimile),

is the telephonic transmission of scanned printed material (both text and images), normally to a
telephone number connected to a printer or other output device. The original document is scanned with
a fax machine (or a telecopier), which processes the contents (text or images) as a single fixed
graphic image, converting it into a bitmap, and then transmitting it through the telephone system in the
form of audio-frequency tones. The receiving fax machine interprets the tones and reconstructs the
image, printing a paper copy.

Common fax machines are designed to scan printed textual and graphic material and then transmit the
information through the telephone network to similar machines, where facsimiles are reproduced close
to the form of the original documents. Fax machines, because of their low cost and their reliability,
speed, and simplicity of operation, revolutionized business and personal correspondence. They
virtually replaced telegraphic services, and they also present an alternative to government-run postal
services and private couriers.

WORKING PRINCIPLE:
Communication between a transmitting and a receiving fax machine opens with the dialing of
the telephone number of the receiving machine. This begins a process known as the
“handshake,” in which the two machines exchange signals that establish compatible features
such as modem speed, source code, and printing resolution. The page information is then
transmitted, followed by a signal that indicates no more pages are to be sent. The called
machine signals receipt of the message, and the calling machine signals to disconnect the
line.

Fax machines consist of three parts:

 A scanner
 A printer
 A fax modem (phone line)

When sending a fax, the scanner and fax modem work together – the scanner by capturing the
document and turning it into a digital signal, and the fax modem by sending that signal over the phone
line.
When receiving a fax, the printer and the fax modem work together – the fax modem by collecting the
digital signal that arrives over the phone line, and the printer by turning that digital information into a
printed piece of paper.

The person desiring to transmit a document clips it to a drum in the transmitter (the drum rotates at
180 rpm during the transmission), and then uses the telephone to call the facsimile machine operator at
the second location. The contact can also be initiated by the person wanting to receive a document.
The purposes served by the voice communication are to let it be known that a transmission is desired,
and to assure that the correct facsimile machine settings are used. Most facsimile machines can
transmit/receive at more than one speed and the operators must decide which to use. After the voice
preliminaries, each operator places the telephone handset in the acoustic coupler. The actual
transmission begins when the transmitter operator pushes the ON switch on the facsimile transmitter.
The document is then transmitted automatically. A signal buzzer alerts each operator when the
transmission is finished. The transmitter operator then turns the transmitter off and removes the
document, and the receiver operator removes the copy from the receiver. If additional documents are
to be transmitted, the operator simply inserts the next document into the facsimile transmitter and it
too will be automatically transmitted when the ON switch is pushed again. When the last document
has been transmitted, the operators remove the telephone handsets from the acoustic couplers and
confirm, by voice, the reception of the documents. Then the handsets are placed back on the
telephones and the telephones become available again for ordinary voice communications.
Summary of working principle:

1. To send a fax, you feed the page into the input slot and it's pulled in between
several pairs of rollers. Larger fax machines have built-in document feeders
that automatically feed in multiple pages from a stack, so you don't have to
stand at the machine feeding in pages one at a time.
2. As the paper moves down, a bright light shines onto it. White areas of the
page reflect a lot of light; black areas reflect little or none.
3. The light reflects off the page into a light-detecting CCD (charged-coupled
device).
4. The CCD turns the analog pattern of black and white areas on the page into
a numeric (digital) pattern of binary zeros and ones and passes the
information to an electronic circuit.
5. The circuit sends the digital information down the telephone line to the fax
machine at the receiving end.
6. When you receive a fax, the same circuit takes incoming digital information
from the phone line and routes it to a built-in printer.
7. In a typical personal fax machine, paper is pulled from a large roll inside the
machine. (In a larger office fax machine, it usually comes from a plain-paper
hopper, similar to the one in a laser printer.)
8. The thermal (heat-based) printer, operated by the circuit, reproduces the
incoming fax on the paper as it moves past.
9. An automatic blade cuts the page and the printed fax emerges from the
output slot.

There are several indicators of fax capabilities: group, class, data transmission rate, and conformance
with ITU-T (formerly CCITT) recommendations.
Group
Analog:
Group 1- take six minutes to transmit a single page, with a vertical resolution of 96 scan lines per inch. Group 1 fax
machines are obsolete and no longer manufactured.

Group 2- take three minutes to transmit a single page, with a vertical resolution of 96 scan lines per inch. Group 2 fax
machines are almost obsolete, and are no longer manufactured. Group 2 fax machines can interoperate with Group 3 fax
machines.

DIGITAL:

Group 3 and 4 faxes are digital formats and take advantage of digital compression methods to greatly reduce transmission
times.
Group 3: take between 6 and 15 seconds to transmit a single page.
Group 4: They are designed to operate over 64 kbit/s digital ISDN circuits.

Class
Computer modems are often designated by a particular fax class, which indicates how much processing is offloaded from
the computer's CPU to the fax modem.
Class 1,2,2.0,2,1

Transmitter:
In a facsimile system, the portion of the system that converts the baseband facsimile picture signals, i.e.,
the information-bearing signals that are obtained by scanning the object, into signals suitable for
transmission by a communications system.
 The facsimile transmitter converts an image into an equivalent electrical signal by means of a photo detector
which is rapidly scanned across the document in a narrow line. The photo detector converts the variations of
optical reflectivity at each point along the scan path into an equivalent electrical signal.

When one line has been scanned, another scan is immediately begun parallel to, but slightly displaced from,
the previous path. By repeating this process hundreds of times, the entire document is examined and
transmitted.

The transmitter scans 180 lines per minute (11m), at either 64 or 96 scan lines per inch (Ipi), as selected by the
operator. When 96 Ipi is used, documents will be "read" at 1.875 column-inches per minute (= 180/96). This
takes about 6 min for a page 11 in long. The electrical signal produced by scanning is converted to a frequency
modulated (FM) signal by a modulator circuit in the facsimile transmitter. The frequency band of the FM signal
is designed to fall within the band of frequencies that can be handled satisfactorily by a voice-grade
communications channel. The FM signal is used to drive an acoustic coupler that connects the facsimile signal
to the telephone system. Any other voice-grade channel, such as radio or leased telephone lines, can be used.

Scanning mechanism:
A scanning process is used to break a printed document up into many horizontal
scan lines which can be transmitted and reproduced serially
A facsimile scanner examines the subject copy and converts its image into an electric signal.

 The document is placed on the glass plate and the cover is closed. The inside of the cover in most
scanners is flat white, although a few are black. The cover provides a uniform background that the scanner
software can use as a reference point for determining the size of the document being scanned. Most
flatbed scanners allow the cover to be removed for scanning a bulky object, such as a page in a thick book.
 In the scanning process, an image of the original page is formed by a lens in a wa
y.

 A lamp is used to illuminate the document. The lamp in newer scanners is either a cold cathode
fluorescent lamp (CCFL) or a xenon lamp, while older scanners may have a standard fluorescent lamp.
 The entire mechanism (mirrors, lens, filter and CCD array) make up the scan head. The scan head is
moved slowly across the document by a belt that is attached to a stepper motor. The scan head is
attached to a stabilizer bar to ensure that there is no wobble or deviation in the pass. Pass means that the
scan head has completed a single complete scan of the document.

 The image of the document is reflected by an angled mirror to another mirror. In some scanners,
there are only two mirrors while others use a three mirror approach. Each mirror is slightly curved to focus
the image it reflects onto a smaller surface.
 The last mirror reflects the image onto a lens. The lens focuses the image through a filter on the
CCD array.
The filter and lens arrangement vary based on the scanner. Some scanners use a three pass scanning
method. Each pass uses a different color filter (red, green or blue) between the lens and CCD array. After
the three passes are completed, the scanner software assembles the three filtered images into a single full-
color image.

The subject copy is wrapped around a transmitting drum, which turns rapidly (180 rpm) during
transmission. Simultaneously, a lamp-photo detector assembly is driven slowly along the length of the
rotating drum. The photo detector sees only a very small area of the subject copy at any instant and
produces an electric current in proportion to the reflectivity of this elemental area. The entire surface
of the document is progressively scanned in a spiral path by the photo detector. If the document is
removed from the drum and laid flat, the path shows as a grid of closely-spaced parallel lines which
are almost parallel to the top edge of the paper. The grid of lines is called a raster, and the individual
lines are called raster lines or scan lines.
The distance between adjacent raster lines is the raster interval, which can be measured in inches or
centimetres. The reciprocal of the raster interval is called the raster density or scan density and is
expressed as the number of lines per inch or lines per centimetre. Another parameter, called the scan
rate, is the number of raster lines produced each minute. For drum-type machines this is the number of
revolutions per minute. A scanner in which the subject copy is rapidly rotated by a drum is a drum
scanner. In addition to drum scanners, there are flatbed scanners which draw the subject copy slowly
through the machine while the optical system rapidly scans it from left to-right to form the raster.
(Some flatbed scanners employ a scanning technique in which the subject copy does not move at all.)
Many flatbed scanners can handle copy of any size, but drum scanners cannot accept copy that
exceeds either the length or the circumference of the drum.

A charge-coupled-
device linear array of small photodiodes is substituted in the facsimile scanner for the ca
mera film. 

The portion of the image falling on the linear diode array is a thin line, 0.005 in. (0.13 
mm) high, across the top of the page being transmitted. 

Typically, 1728 diodes are used to view this line for a page 8½ in. (216 mm) wide. 

The photodiode corresponding to the left edge of the page is first checked to determine 
whether the very small portion of the image it detects is white (the paper background) o
r black (a mark). The spot detected by a single photodiode is called a picture element (a 
pel for short if it is recorded as either black or white, or a pixel if a gray scale is used). E
ach of the 1728 diodes is checked in sequence, to read across the page. Then the origina
l page is stepped the height of this thin line, and the next line is read. The step-and
read process repeats until the whole page has been scanned.

Another class of flatbed scanner uses a contact image sensor linear array of photodiodes 
whose width is the same as the scanned width. One version has a linear array of fiber-
optics rod lenses between the page being scanned and the sensor array.
 Light from a fluorescent lamp or a linear light-emitting-
diode array illuminates the document beneath the rod lenses. The reflected light picked 
up by the sensor generates a signal that is proportional to the brightness of the spot bein
g scanned. A second version has a hole in the center of each square pixel sensor element
. Light from a light-emitting diode passes through this hole to illuminate the area of the 
document page at this pixel. No lenses or other optical parts are used.
In drum-type scanning, the original sheet of paper is mounted on a drum that rotates wh
ile the scan head with a photosensor moves sideways the width of one scanning line for 
each turn of the drum. Drum-type scanners are used mainly for remote publishing facsi
miles and for color scanning in graphic arts systems.
In the recording process, facsimile signals are converted into a copy of the original. Fac
simile receivers commonly print pages as they are received, but in an alternative arrang
ement pages may be stored and viewed on a computer screen.

Receiver:

The facsimile receiver converts the FM signal received from the communications channel back into an image
resembling the subject copy. The image is produced by a scanning process which is synchronized with the
transmitter's scanner. On each scan, marks are made along a narrow line with the darkness produced at any
spot being proportional to the optical reflectivity sensed by the photo detector in the transmitter. The
facsimile receiver usually reproduces the transmitted document on special paper. One example is electrolytic
paper, which is paper that has been saturated with a chemical solution that turns sepia or black when an
electric charge passes through it. The greater the electric charge, the darker the paper becomes. The paper is
supplied in a roll that is sufficient for thirty-five 8~ x 11-in copies, and kept in a sealed plastic bag, until used, to
prevent it from drying out. No processing is needed; the paper dries quickly after it leaves the receiver, and
the image is permanent and durable.

https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/88144NCJRS.pdf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leuXupfq1G0