The camera may be in an unusable state and using RMA sounds like a good strategy IMO. Are you working with a RICOH account manager? Or, are you buying the cameras from a site such as Amazon?
Just so you know, the behavior of the Z1. If the power on the USB port is cut and then turned on again, the camera will reboot.
I don’t recommend this technique below, but if you do development regularly with multiple cameras, this might be of interest. The camera must be in developer mode (which will void the warranty) for you to be able to reboot the bootloader. Again, I don’t recommend this route, but am just sharing a technique that worked for me when the camera was bricked, with no return option.