Enlargement and Reduction Characteristics of Facsimile Transmission Copies

A research project was designed to determine the extent of enlargement and reduction of documents transmitted by different facsimile machines. In addition, the scope of the study was expanded to answer the following questions: Does the transmitting or receiving machine have a greater influence on the enlargement/reduction of faxed documents? Is the degree of enlargement/reduction consistent from one transmission to another? Do significant differences exist in the degree of enlargement reduction from one page to another in multi-page facsimile transmissions? Is the degree of enlargement/ reduction equal along the horizontal and vertical axes? Receiving machines were found to have a greater influence on the output size of faxed documents relative to the sending machines. Considerable changes in size were observed between originals and faxed copies, between separate pages of multipage facsimile transmissions and within individual faxed documents. Although extreme differences in size were uncommon, faxed copies ranged from 12% smaller to 2.9% larger than the original template.Document examiners should be aware of these facts when inspecting faxed documents.