Lease vs buy MFP printers
Posted by RestartRebootRetire@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 24 comments
I've been at this company three years and their Xerox MFP lease is up. I think they ended up paying like $36k for two printers over six years, about 5k sheets a month each, with no preventative maintenance, just repairs when needed.
Local options are few and my gut says we could probably do better working directly with Xerox or Ricoh and just purchase outright, but I don't have much experience with this over my career.
Just hoping for up-to-date recommendations from people who've been there, done this.
sryan2k1@reddit
It depends on how we catch them, we've had very good luck leasing new Ricoh units when the generation is new, buying them out at the end of the lease, and riding them until Ricoh no longer supports them.
We're in the law industry and as much as we try to be paperless a lot of things out of our control mean a lot of printing. We average about 25k pages a day in the US alone, mostly on Ricoh MP(c) 6503's right now, though those are getting replaced next year.
Beneficial-Gift5330@reddit
I'm assuming you're part of a massive firm (or adjacent) but man 25K pages daily is bonkers for me to process in 2026, even at a massive company.
sryan2k1@reddit
600 employees are so. Far from massive.
Beneficial-Gift5330@reddit
Double Damn then. Maybe I'm just too far out that part of the game anymore
LeaveMickeyOutOfThis@reddit
Whatever direction you go, make sure hard drive destruction is included.
Then-Chef-623@reddit
oh ffs
iceph03nix@reddit
We usually end up leasing to own. Lease until it's old enough to buy out cheap.
VivienM7@reddit
Look at Canon too...
Crazy-Rest5026@reddit
Maintenance contract and let it be someone else problem. 36k for 3 years. 12k yearly ain’t bad for not having to deal with that nonsense.
BrentNewland@reddit
What printer models were they? Were they supplying maintenance items and long-term consumables, like fusers and toner waste cartridges?
If the savings is large enough, perhaps buying an additional printer or two becomes cost effective,. With a spare, you can have a printer down for a longer period of time, which allows cheaper repair options.
progenyofeniac@reddit
When I managed printers for my org, we bought the printers and MFPs outright but paid a provider a per-page cost that included toner, maintenance, and repairs. It was wonderful and I highly recommend that process.
If you can get management to sign off on leasing the devices themselves, go for it, but I doubt you’ll save much on that.
itskdog@reddit
One of our potential suppliers in our latest procurement process is even offering a flat fee, no per-page costs, based solely on our past usage measured by our existing PaperCut install, and adjusted each year based on the past year's usage.
Another is offering a higher per-page cost in exchange for no separate lease contract and just paying per-page.
Dazzling-Window-6789@reddit
We use Sharp, havent had much good luck with anything else.
Random-D@reddit
probably not finding a lot of enthusiasm for printers in r/sysadmin
either way you can purchase them ofc and thats almost certainly cheaper in the long run if you find the answer to the question, who's gonna fix them if they are broken. if you are smart its not you
FrostyWalrus2@reddit
And this is why you push to lease the printers with a maintenance contract.
sryan2k1@reddit
Because most companies buy the cheapest consumer or prosumer shit they can find and complain when it sucks. Our Ricoh fleet is bulletproof.
93-T@reddit
I replaced about 200 Ricohs with HP in 2018 and got hired in the place to be on their help desk team right after. I watched 1 desktop Ricoh outlast an entire fleet of HP m880 printers. I miss Ricoh.
Master-IT-All@reddit
Lease or buy doesn't matter except for figuring out the cost.
What's really key is maintenance. I would want a 3rd party specialist. No way I'm opening up an MFP to change rollers and drums.
anonymousITCoward@reddit
We always suggest leasing... that way we're not on the hook for maintenance.
kona420@reddit
Buy-out's are usually very reasonable.
180,000 impressions is nothing for a full size MFP.
Eventually it becomes difficult to keep them up to date and SMB scanning stops working due to updates on the server side. Doubly so for any modern apps like sharepoint/onedrive integration. If you just need to scan to email or have a product that makes scan to SFTP workable, then place them behind a print server, theres not much reason to update their software.
Talk to your rep about what a service plan costs. Changing the guts of one of these machines out exceeds the value of the machine pretty quickly. Better to have them on the hook than the other way around.
itcontractor247@reddit
I had a similar conversation with my printer vendor about a year ago when our contract on 7 devices was coming up for renewal. For me to outright purchase these devices would have been significantly more expensive than leasing them. Plus the vendor provides all the toner, maintenance, and the only thing we need to deal with is ordering the paper.
It also depends on the office setting, number of users, and how many pages get printed. For us, it made financial sense to lease them and not have to worry about it.
bythepowerofboobs@reddit
Our CEO is a CPA and doesn't believe in leasing anything. We always buy used MFP's from local places. Usually end up with a model that's around 25k new for 3k-5k used. We then pay their monthly support contract (around 150/month/machine including toner) until the machine goes EOL, then rinse and repeat.
Crafty_Dog_4226@reddit
I used to buy instead of lease and use time and materials basis to fix them. Headache. I was trying to save the company money. Our Controller said just lease them with a supply and maintenance plan and be done. Best decision that was made for me.
CeC-P@reddit
I've had to negotiate this for 4 different companies and my conclusion now is:
- hardware lease + per page rate, they throw in the toner, do all maintenance - we lease it
- if we're buying the toner, we buy the hardware and add it to our pool of service contract machines.
- if your company puts in HP instead of literally anything else, quit