Last week, the FunctionEight Hong Kong office was buzzing with excitement for our new arrival. Everyone eagerly watched the elevator doors as if a celebrity were about to walk out of them. In fact, we’d ordered a new printer.

To celebrate the arrival of our office equipment, we thought we would take the opportunity to talk about the process of setting up a new printer in case you’re not inclined to download and read the actual instruction manual. (We always recommend reading the instruction manual.)

Obviously the actual nitty gritty will depend on the brand and model that you’ve purchased. Yet, the most popular in our experience for a small-medium sized office in Hong Kong would be either a Ricoh or Cannon, which tend to be quite similar.

Hot Tip #1 – Plug it in

Have you ever heard that IT advice before?

Really though, you need to connect a power source, and probably a network cable too.

Hot Tip #2 – Use an online portal to upload your settings to your new printer

In our case, we were upgrading a previous Ricoh printer to a new Ricoh printer. Therefore, all of our printer settings were exported from the previous printer, uploaded into the online portal and imported back into the new printer.

That makes things super speedy. An example of a web portal:

Hot Tip #3 – Save time by scanning straight to your PC with a shared folder

Scanning to email can be slow, as the documents need to travel into the cloud, through your email security and into your inbox. Your average 2-3 page document might take as long as 10 minutes.

The solution is to set up a folder on your PC that the printer can automatically scan to.

Setup can be a little tricky, but it essentially involves creating a new folder, changing the share settings of that folder and then giving the network path (shown in the screenshot below) to your printer.

For good measure, here are some more tips if you’re thinking about setting up a printer and don’t know how:

  • The process for connecting your printer to your network will differ if your office is using a static and dynamic IP address
  • If you’re using Win10, search for a new device in the printer section of the control panel and it will automatically install the drivers for you
  • Contact your Internet Service Provider to find out what your SMTP address is, for setting the scan document by email.
  • Maybe consider hiring a professional to handle this task for you.

Good luck!