The printer to buy if you need fax is the Brother MFC-L2820DW at $279.99, for any office whose documents are black text: a 33.6K modem with 400 pages of fax memory, a 50-page document feeder, and about 3.3 cents a page. It is also the budget pick, because it is the cheapest of the three. If you need color as well, the Epson EcoTank ET-4800 adds refillable tanks; if you fax daily, the ET-4950 adds a duplexer and a bigger tray.
Do printers still come with fax?
A shrinking number do. Of the seventeen printers we cover, three publish a fax modem: the Brother MFC-L2820DW, the Epson EcoTank ET-4800 and the Epson EcoTank ET-4950. On most current consumer printers fax has simply been removed, and the model naming is the tell — on Brother, machines that fax carry the MFC prefix, while DCP and HL models do not. Check the specification sheet for a modem speed before you buy, because “all-in-one” no longer implies fax.
How we picked
Fax is a hard capability filter rather than a preference, so the shortlist wrote itself. Among the machines that qualified, these are the four questions that decided the order.
- Does the manufacturer publish a fax modem? Not “fax to cloud” or an app-based service — an actual modem with a published speed that connects to a phone line. Only three machines we cover do.
- Is there fax memory? This is the specification everyone ignores and then needs. Without it, a fax arriving while the machine is out of paper or busy simply fails. Brother publishes 400 pages of fax memory on our top pick.
- Is there a document feeder? Faxing is the original multi-page job. All three picks have one, and all three scan a single side at a time, which we say rather than leaving you to discover.
- What does a page cost? Our own arithmetic on published supply prices and rated yields. Fax users receive documents as well as sending them, so the cost of an incoming page matters as much as the cost of one you chose to print.
Who still genuinely needs fax
It is easy to be sniffy about fax, and it is also beside the point: the people who need it are not choosing to. Medical practices exchange records over fax because the rules they work under treat a direct point-to-point transmission differently from email. Legal and title work still runs on faxed signatures in many jurisdictions. Real estate agents fax contracts because the other side’s brokerage does. Some government and insurance offices accept nothing else.
What all of those have in common is that the requirement comes from somebody else. You cannot talk your counterparty out of it, so the machine has to have a modem. That is why this page exists as a capability filter rather than a recommendation: if you need fax, the shortlist is three machines long and nothing else on this site is a substitute.
The phone line problem, which is the real catch
A fax modem needs a phone line, and most households and small offices no longer have one. This is the thing that goes wrong after the printer arrives, so it is worth settling before you buy rather than after.
A traditional copper landline works. Cable or fiber internet phone service — a voice line delivered over your internet connection, often called VoIP — sometimes works and sometimes does not, because fax was designed for an analog circuit and a digital voice service can compress or re-time the audio in ways the modem cannot follow. Providers often recommend dropping the modem to a slower speed, which is why the 33.6K number on a specification sheet is adjustable in the menu rather than fixed. Owner reports of faxing successfully over internet phone service on these machines do exist, but it is not something we can promise and we are not going to.
| Printer | Fax | Document feeder | Auto duplex | Wired network |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brother MFC-L2820DW | 33.6K modem, 400-page memory | 50 pages | Yes | Ethernet |
| Epson EcoTank ET-4800 | Yes | Yes | Not published | Ethernet |
| Epson EcoTank ET-4950 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Ethernet |
Read from Brother USA and Epson US product pages, re-verified on 11 November 2026. “Not published” means the maker does not state the feature, which is not the same as the machine lacking it — we will not claim a feature we cannot source. Epson publishes fax and a document feeder for both EcoTank models without naming a modem speed, so we do not quote one.
If you have no phone line at all and cannot get one, a fax printer is the wrong purchase and an online fax service is the right one. We would rather say that than sell you a modem you cannot plug in. In that case, buy the printer that suits your actual printing — the best printers under $500 is the page for that — and handle fax in software.
What faxing costs you in supplies
Fax has a cost profile nothing else on this site shares: you do not choose what arrives. An incoming twenty-page document prints whether you wanted twenty pages or not, which makes cost per page less negotiable than usual and makes automatic two-sided printing worth more than it looks.
| Printer and supply | Per page | A 20-page fax |
|---|---|---|
| Epson EcoTank ET-4950, 502 bottles | ~0.3¢ | $0.07 |
| Epson EcoTank ET-4800, 522 bottles | ~0.4¢ | $0.08 |
| Brother MFC-L2820DW, TN830XL | ~3.3¢ | $0.66 |
| Brother MFC-L2820DW, standard TN830 | ~5.1¢ | $1.02 |
| Cartridge inkjet, published range | about 7.5 cents a page | Several times the above |
Our arithmetic on dated published supply prices divided by rated ISO yields, plus roughly a cent a sheet for paper — the method. The last two rows are the same printer on its two cartridge sizes, which is the cheapest decision on this page.
Note the two Brother rows. They are the identical machine, and buying the standard cartridge instead of the high-yield one costs you about 5.1 cents a page instead of 3.3 cents for the same toner. On a machine that receives documents it did not ask for, that is the first thing to get right. The cheap-toner roundup works through the cartridge ladders in more detail.
Four things to check before you order
- The model prefix. On Brother, only MFC models fax. A DCP or HL model with an otherwise identical specification has no modem, and the model numbers are close enough to order the wrong one.
- A published modem speed or fax memory figure. If the specification sheet mentions fax only in marketing copy and never names a modem, be suspicious — some machines offer app-based or cloud-forwarded fax rather than a modem, which is a different product.
- What your phone service actually is. Copper landline, internet voice service, or nothing. This decides whether the machine can do the job at all, and it is the step people skip.
- Whether a subscription is attached to the supplies. None of these three requires one, which is deliberate — a fax machine that stops printing because a payment failed is worse than no fax machine. How to run any printer without one.