If your going through that much ink, you should be racking in so much cash that the ink costs don't matter. You should also be rocking a 570 at least. I WOULD NOT waste your time messing around with 3rd party ink in Latex. If you are saving $14k, how much are you spending on inks annually? Seems like alot.
Considered a 570 Bigfish but we were just dabbling in latex so it didn't make sense to go whole hog.
We still are primarily eco solvent. We're actually a sports photography business and our banner division (sportsbanner.com) produced over 4k banners in 2017 with an average of 20 ft² each. All of our banners are full coverage and run about $0.30 per ft² with OEM inks and $0.15 per ft² third party (Nazdar).
Currently we're on track for producing a tick over 5k banners for 2018 so the math is: 100k ft² x $.15 = $15,000 in savings more or less. We sell the banners at $4 per ft² so it's a nice additional revenue source for our primary business.
Now my question is if "it sounds like a lot" and "something sounds off", how many banners does the average sign shop produce in a year?