I'll throw my two pence in...
Our school has been with Ricoh for 5 years (3 initially and then extended for 12 months, twice).
I'm super happy with them and contract is up for renewal soon and I can't think of one reason to move away.
We have about 30 machines, a mix of smaller machines in some offices and classrooms to larger floor-standing photocopiers all the way up to our beast in the reprographics room (which is the only mono machine, all others full colour).
From a practical standpoint, they are generally very reliable machines.
When we do have issues their support is phenomenally good. We seem to receive the same two or three engineers who are all very good at what they do and very friendly and knowledgeable.
I am always amazed at how quickly they turn up - in the last half term break I logged a call with Ricoh due to dirty printouts (coloured bands appearing up the page) and I was surprised to find the engineer in the building only a couple of hours later already half way through fixing the machine!
I guess it does depend on where you are located though; I can't fault the engineers that serve this area.
When I took up my position at this school the toner replenishment system was a complete mess - they had about two spare cartridges for the whole site and were regularly running out and then arguing with Ricoh about getting spare supplies.
As it turned out, nobody was managing the toner deliveries so it was a free for all. Cartridges would turn up at reception and would either be snatched by random staff members who were stockpiling for their own machines, or immediately slammed into the wrong machine i.e. the cartridge destined for the Art printer ended up going into one of the IT rooms.
It caused chaos for the ordering system as you can imagine.
Since then, I have taken on all the toner replenishment duties and they all get locked in my store room and at last count I had about 35 spare cartridges on the shelf ready to go in when users report they have run out. The system is running flawlessly so it certainly does pay to be thorough in managing the system. As long as you put the right cartridge in the right machine (each postage label has the printer serial number and printer name on it) it's pretty foolproof.
Just don't let teachers get involved in any capacity.
You can request that Ricoh set the machines to either automatically order a cartridge when a colour hits 20%, or a new cartridge will be ordered on replacement of the old one.
We went with the former as it made more sense to me, especially as some of our smaller devices are very low volume and 20% could last a good chunk of the academic year.
They've also recently launched a new web portal for managing your devices including ordering toner supplies if ever required and logging faults on.
The new portal is eons better than the old one which was slow and behaved erratically when a session timed out.
I have previously had good experience with Toshiba machines when working at a private school, I recall having an abundance of supplies (almost too many, I had to find a new cupboard to store them in).
I think they are comparatively expensive though to other suppliers and their service on the repair side of things was definitely slower than Ricoh.
I'd definitely be looking at those two at the top of my list though.
