It may seem like a company coming out with a new VHS deck in this day and age, but faxes continue to live on, and Panasonic is introducing its PW608DL "paperless" fax machine to help the protocol integrate into a digital office. While most of us are comfortable scanning and emailing documents, there are plenty of fax hold-outs keeping the format thriving; while local government agencies may not have websites that let you submit documents online, nearly all will accept faxes. For home users, fax software can work with your modem to let you send and receive documents over your phone line (if you still have a land line, that is). In offices, though, that kind of solution would tie up a whole PC for a shared office fax line, or need individual fax numbers if each employee ran the software locally.

Panasonic's PW608DL will let you preview incoming faxes on its 3.9-inch LCD screen. If you do need to make a hard copy of anything, you have the option to print out just the pages or parts of pages you need. Quick faxes can be sent directly from the device using its phone keypad to enter text like you would for an SMS message, or you can always jot something down and scan it in like a traditional fax. The PW608DL accepts SD cards, so you can digitally load documents to the fax from your PC, keeping you from wasting paper on print-outs.

For now the PW608DL looks Japanese-only, but faxing is still big enough in the U.S. for us to expect to see it make its way across the Pacific sometime soon.

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