This review note is really overdue (we know Qimage now nearly 4 years). Qimage is at $44.95 a bargain printing application. We only concentrate in thise review note on why you might want to get Qimage if you are only interested in high quality prints. Actually Qimage is way more than just a simple printing application as you can print multiple images per page, filter image and much more.

If Qimage would not be fully color managed we would not even start looking at it. But Qimage implements color management for many years and also improved on it by adding "rendering intent" and even "black point compensation":

Qimage color management

The real core strength os Qimage is it's powerful upsizing and final smart sharpening features. This means you only keep your images in your base resolution and Qimage does the rest:

Qimage unique Vector and Pyramid interpolation

Qimage improved over time the upsizing algorithms. The latest incarnation is the new "Pyramid" upsizing.

A note on the Qimage UI. I had over the years many discussion with Mike Chaney (Qimage author) on his UI. We think you need to get used to it but once you use Qimage on a daily basis it is easy to master.

Summary

Finally you don't need to do a manual upsizing of your photos and even the final sharpening is taken care of.

Highly Recommended Printing Application

My friend Jim Collum had big troubles to print panoramic images longer than 36" on his Epson 7600 from Photoshop CS and using the Epson drivers under Windows 2000. It seems to be an issue related to Photoshop CS as Qimage just prints fine using the same drivers.

Jim said "Qimage has been a lifesaver for big pano prints". Jim's actual gallery prints can be as large as 22x58".

In his help files Mike Chaney explains how to work with larger panoramics in Qimage.

10/24/2004 Printing while working with Photoshop (Windows only)

There is one more argument to use Qimage. We often work on images in C1 and Photoshop while we want to print portfolio test prints. Qimage is the ideal application:

• Low memory usage (about 100-120MB for most of our images) and can be run in parallel to Photoshop
• Photoshop can only print one image at a time (Qimage can easily batch as many files as you like)
• Photoshop blocks while printing (Qimage works in parallel)
• You cannot run a second copy of PS on Windows

For us these features alone would be worth Qimage at $44.95.