It will be real interesting hearing from advanced user who have lots of experience setting up CM, ink splits etc. Will not having control of this result in better output or not?
Certainly hope you can still set ink limit based on what media and amount of passes you choose. If not you would be limiting the gamut of this printer for media that will take a lot of ink and on the other hand it might be a real challenge on media that won't take that much ink.
Hard to believe that they would do this and limit what can be achieved with a advance user and RIP.
There is no question that the profile creation sequence is much easier and quicker when using the new Latex 360 on-board process. I have been able to get an entire profile built in under 30 minutes, including the ink limiting, calibration/ linearization, and ICC, which is easily (best case) half the time that it takes on the L2 machines. The operator does seem have a somewhat less granular level of control over ink limiting when using this procedure versus the traditional RIP-based approach used with halftone printers.
The resulting image quality on the media that I have worked with to this point has been outstanding, with greatly reduced ink coalescence, presumably due to the presence of the optimizer. I have also noted a much greater resistance to abrasion on SAV and banner vinyl with this inkset.
There are some medias that are not recommended for on-board profile creation, such as textiles. In these cases the traditional RIP-driven profile creation process will need to be used in order to build a custom media profile.