New Sharp End of lease HDD feature

Is there a charge or fee built into the lease?

How will the data be erased? Will it at least meet the DOD standard? Most specs like HIPPA & The Mass Privacy laws reference a government standard Like the DOD (Dept. of Defense) standard. While this will NOT satisfy your most security conscience customers it is at least defensible in court that you did what the DOD recommends to meet your due diligence requirement. If all that Sharp is doing is a format, that data can be recovered by someone with the right forensic tools and knowledge.

A response from a different board suggest that on the latest series of Sharp copiers, in Admin Mode, there is a new soft button that once touched erases all customer variable data and brings the copier back to default settings.

All copier vendors can do this in Service Mode, so as suspected, this is not really a new feature but good Marketing.

While it may be argued that it's good marketing, I would think otherwise and also state that it's horrible customer service. #1, I don't think it truly wipes the hard drive clean; only a reformat would do that. #2, it would be much easier to just sell whatever flavor of "Data Overwrite" kit your particular brand sells as an upfront cost and installation to the copier. The cost is minimal and offers the extra protection of keeping the drive always clean.