Thank you. I called the Big Four (KM, Xerox, Ricoh, Canon) for demos and aside from KM I have yet to hear back from the rest. I liked a lot the KM Accurio C6100 and the few tests we ran came out beautifully even when printing in duplex on 20pt stock. The click charge was interesting at $04.4 for color and $0.02 for black, with parts and labor included for seven years. Although it seems like a photocopier on steroids, I believe it can hold up over time and the KM service support would be there to see it through.
I should add that in December we purchased a four year old refurbished MGI Meteor DP8700XL with just under four million clicks which was installed end of January, and unfortunately it has been a dissapointment unitl now due to non stop error codes and constant jams, which is why we are in the market for a better option. The dealer we bought it from hasn't been able to get it to work properly up to now (although I give them an A for effort), and today we gave them one last chance to get it up to factory specs by weeks end, failing which we will have no choice but to swap it for one of the suggestions above.
One of the main advantages we found with the MGI is that it's more of an industrial type machine, as well as the "pay as you go" system regarding toner, which for mostly black printing which is what we do would put us ahead of the game, or so we believe. Thinking out loud, even if the MGI starts to work properly, it might still be wise to have another press such as the suggested Ricoh 8220 so that we would always be in production, especially given that 90% of what we print is Next Day Service.
I appreciate all the great advise offered here. Thank you