It's a 5-15 minute drive for me to get to the print shop. It's near food options that I eat at somewhat regularly, so I could just tack it on to a trip to dinner, but still...
I'd rather spend the $150 once and never need to go to the print shop ever, though I did need to recently to send a fax because the DMV is still living in the 90s.
Side note...my smartphone is...well...a phone, in addition to being a computer. Why the hell can't smartphones send faxes?
As for the why... faxes operate over the legacy network using an acoustically coupled modem.
At some point, yes, the digital signal from my phone gets converted to an analog signal to be sent over traditional telephone wires. My phone just has to produce the right noise for a receiving fax machine to understand it once the noise is converted to an analog signal.
Looked into it...so many of them want you to subscribe or have a stupid pricing scheme.
> As for the why... faxes operate over the legacy network using an acoustically coupled modem.
There's nothing special about a fax connection. It's just a telephone line (which my phone has). The "modem" part could easily be done in software. All it has to do is synthesize the right noise on the line.