The truck came, two people wheeled the machine into the corner, they printed a configuration page, they got you to sign something, and they left. Four hours later half the office cannot print, the front desk can print but only in black and white, and the scanner emails nothing to anybody. This is the most common week-one experience with a new leased copier, and almost none of it is the machine's fault.
Here is what actually has to happen, who is supposed to do each piece, and where it usually goes wrong.
What the Dealer Does and What They Do Not
Read your delivery and installation terms before the truck arrives, because the word "installation" means much less than people assume. Standard installation on almost every copier lease covers uncrating, physical placement, powering on, loading initial toner, running a calibration, and printing a test page from the device itself. That is it. The machine works. Nothing else knows it exists.
Network configuration is usually a separate line item. Some dealers include a basic setup for one workstation, some include a flat "network integration" charge of $150 to $450, and some quote per hour at $95 to $175. Driver deployment across every workstation, scan destinations, address book import, and anything touching your directory service is frequently billed on top of that or excluded entirely.
Get this in writing before delivery. Ask specifically: does the quote include installing print drivers on all workstations, configuring scan to email, and configuring scan to folder? If the answer is vague, it means no. Our overview of copier lease delivery and installation covers what else commonly falls outside the base charge.
Wired or Wireless: Pick Wired If You Can
Most business copiers ship with both gigabit ethernet and a wireless adapter, and a lot of offices default to wireless because running a cable is annoying. For a device this size that is usually a mistake.
A 40 page per minute copier receiving a 60MB print job over a congested 2.4GHz band will take noticeably longer to start printing than the same job over a cable, and large scans back to a folder are worse. More importantly, wireless clients on many office networks get DHCP addresses from a pool that can shift, and a copier whose address changes is a copier that stops printing for everyone until somebody notices.
Use wireless when the machine sits somewhere a cable genuinely cannot reach, when you are in a leased suite where you cannot pull cable, or in a temporary or event setup. Otherwise pull the cable. It is a one-time cost of $75 to $250 for a drop and it removes an entire category of future support calls.
If you do go wireless, confirm the copier supports 5GHz. Some budget models are 2.4GHz only, which puts a heavy device on the busiest band in the building.
Give the Copier a Fixed Address
This is the single most valuable thing you can do on day one and it takes about four minutes.
The machine needs an address that never changes, because every driver, every scan shortcut, and every mobile print setup will point at it. There are two correct ways to do that. Either set a static IP on the device itself, chosen from outside your DHCP pool, or create a DHCP reservation on your router or server that always hands the same address to the copier's MAC address. The reservation method is better in most offices because the record lives in one place your IT person already manages.
Find the MAC address on the configuration page the installers printed. If they took it with them, print another from the device menu under network settings or reports.
While you are in there, set a hostname that means something. A device called "RICOH-3A7B21" tells nobody anything. Called "copier-frontdesk" it tells everybody where it is, and users can connect by name even if the address does change.
Deploying Drivers Without Doing It Twenty Times
You have three ways to get the machine onto workstations, and the right one depends on how your office is set up.
Direct IP printing is the simplest. Each machine connects straight to the copier's address using a driver downloaded from the manufacturer. Fast, no server involved, no single point of failure. The downside is that every change has to be made on every workstation, which is fine at eight users and painful at forty.
Print server or group policy deployment centralizes everything. You install and configure the driver once with your defaults, then push it. This is the right answer if you already run a Windows domain, and it lets you enforce useful defaults like duplex and mono, which quietly cuts click charges.
Cloud print management, meaning services like Microsoft Universal Print or the manufacturer's own cloud connector, works well for offices with no server and staff who move between locations. It costs a per-user monthly fee but removes the driver problem entirely for remote and hybrid staff. Our look at cloud printing setup on a leased copier covers the tradeoffs.
Whichever route you pick, set duplex and monochrome as the workstation defaults. On a 6,000 page a month office, defaulting to duplex mono instead of simplex color is worth $150 to $400 a month in click charges. Nobody will complain, because anyone who needs color will select it.
Scan to Email Is Where Everyone Gets Stuck
The copier has to authenticate to a mail server to send anything, and modern mail providers made that harder on purpose.
Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace both disabled basic username and password SMTP authentication for security reasons, which broke scan to email on a large number of installed copiers. If your dealer's technician is trying to type your email password into the copier, that approach is probably not going to work and it is a bad idea anyway.
The two working approaches are an SMTP relay connector, where you authorize the copier's static IP to relay through your tenant without a password, or a dedicated app account with modern authentication if the copier's firmware supports OAuth. Newer devices from the major manufacturers support the second. Older ones do not, which is one more argument for the relay.
Either way, this is where the static IP earns its keep, because a relay connector authorizes by address. If the copier's address moves, scanning stops.
What Most Guides Miss
Nobody tells you that a networked copier arrives with its administrative password set to the manufacturer's default, its web interface open on the network, and often an unencrypted internal hard drive holding an image of every document it has processed.
That machine is a full computer with a web server, and it is sitting on your network with credentials that are printed in a manual anybody can download. On a leased device it is worse, because the machine goes back to the dealer at end of term with that drive still in it. There are documented cases of businesses receiving off-lease copiers still holding the previous tenant's scanned records.
Four things to do in the first week. Change the administrator password from the default and record it somewhere your IT person can find it. Disable protocols you do not use, particularly FTP, Telnet, and older SMB versions. Enable the device's encryption and overwrite feature if it has one, which most business-class machines do under a security or data protection menu. And confirm now, in writing, what the dealer's end of lease data wipe procedure is and whether you can keep or destroy the drive. Our guides on copier lease data security wipes and data security at the end of a copier lease cover the return process specifically.
One more practical note. Put the copier on a UPS, not a power strip. These machines pull hard during fuser warm-up, and an unclean shutdown mid-job can corrupt the internal drive. A $180 unit is much cheaper than a service call and a day of downtime.
A Realistic Week One Checklist
Before delivery, confirm what network setup is included and get a live ethernet drop or confirmed wireless coverage where the machine will sit. Confirm power requirements, since larger units need a dedicated 20 amp circuit.
On delivery day, keep the configuration page, get the MAC address, and set the fixed address and hostname before the technicians leave.
In week one, deploy drivers with duplex and mono defaults, configure scan to email through a relay, load the address book, change the admin password, and disable unused protocols. Then print and scan from three different workstations before you sign off on the installation, because that signature is often what closes out the dealer's obligation.
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