You mean the printer itself runs slower?  Qimage can process faster than any printer so if the printer is running slow, that has nothing to do with Qimage.  Did you turn off the AI Copilot option that forces the highest quality setting in the driver?  If you didn't, Qimage will set the driver to the highest quality even if you lower it.

Also, leave Qimage set to "Max" for print res which is normally 720 PPI.  The print res in Qimage is how fast and what quality Qimage processes.  The quality in the driver is how fast and what quality the printer prints.  The two are separate.  180 is way too low and I wouldn't even use 360 (stick with 720).  What is it that you are printing that you don't care about print quality and only care about speed?  You could just use LR if you don't care about quality.  Qimage is about three things: quality, ease of use when printing multiples, and features.

Regards,
Mike

No software can control how much the roll advances before or after a job since that is internal to the driver.  But... you can control how much leftover space is on your "page".  All printers require that you define a page length when using roll paper so just be sure there is no white space above or below the print on Qimage's live view.  If there is white space either above or below the print, your page length is longer than it needs to be.  The solution is to redefine your page length to something smaller.  Qimage will do that for you automatically if you change your placement to IntelliCut and you turn on the auto roll length option next to the media size dropdown.

Regards,
Mike

Makes sense.  It's good to experiment.  If you have really specific subject matter like a lot of high frequency detail in nature shots, Lanczos may actually be better than the high-tech methods like Fusion or Forge which try to make cleaner edges on common photographic subjects like vehicles, buildings, people, clothing, macros of flowers, and other things that have solid areas with sharp edges.  Forge will try to make "predictions" about detail and edges which won't be optimal (to the eye) with random sticks, leaves, sand, bark, and those kinds of things.

Think of the above as being similar to your antialiasing (AA) example.  If you take a picture of sand and downsample to 1/4 the resolution, there may be a pixel in the smaller final image that is halfway between a black grain of sand and a tan grain of sand from the original high res version.  In the output, the "correct" thing to do is show that pixel as a dark tan that is halfway between black and tan because it is on neither the black nor the tan pixel.  But that makes a blurry spot in reality and it looks better to the eye if you just pick one or the other (since it's a random pattern).

If you look at the sharpening section under Edit, Preferences, Printing Options, you may also want to try the "static" option.  The smart sharpen option tries to model sharpening after the size (MP) of the original photo vs the size of the print you chose.  All of this stuff is done to try to make your print look the best it can and that's not the same as making print to file result viewed on screen look its best.  So the "static" option sharpens at the finest level of detail regardless of print size and you could play with that.

Mike

It depends on a few factors, actually.  You can set Qimage's print resolution independent of the driver so you could have your driver running at 720 and in Qimage you can pick either 360 or 720 at which point the droplet sizes are the same because the driver is set to the same resolution.  The resolution that the driver is using is listed above the preview page on the live view in Qimage (for example 720 x 720).  But that's the driver, not the printer.

The printer itself uses 5760 x 1440, 2880 x 1440, 1440 x 720, or other combinations so it's not always trivial to know the droplet size.  But yes, when the droplet size changes, they adjust the ink flow to compensate.  You want your 360 PPI prints to look the same as your 720 PPI prints overall so in the end close to the same amount of ink has to be laid down to get that look.

Simply put, if you have selected good/high quality settings in the driver settings and you see (720 x 720) listed above the live view in Qimage, the driver is "running at" 720 PPI.  You can set Qimage's printer res to High-360 or Max-720 and all that is going to change is that you are instructing Qimage to send a "blockier" lower res image when you choose 360: the driver is going to use the same amount if ink AND the same droplet size.

Mike

If all the colors are missing, there could be a problem with the head.  Clogs don't usually affect all colors at once.  I would ask on Jose Rodriguez's group on Facebook as they are better with the hardware end of things:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1915547415436501

Regards,
Mike

I would have no idea without having the original to work with as there are a LOT of settings that affect this.  There's a lot of noise and sharpening artifacts in your LR and PS examples and some of that "detail" could just be artifacts.

Forge interpolation has a tendency to create smooth edges and works well with a variety of subjects.  If you are going to print sticks and pine needles, sand, tree bark, and other random surfaces where the eye won't catch things like noise and artifacts, something simple like Lanczos might be better.  You could try Lanczos interpolation and see if that works better for those types of images.

Mike

Not at all!  It'll put down the same amount of ink at 360 vs 720.  It would be bad if it didn't use as much ink at 360: that would mean your print would look quite different (lighter) at 360.

Regards,
Mike

Excessive in what way?  What are you losing?  A few seconds in print time per 8x10?  I always feel like if you commit a photo to print, you should print it at the highest quality possible to get the most of your printer.  Copies, scans of documents, PDFs, etc. are a different story but why wouldn't you want your photos to have the most detail possible?

Regards,
Mike

Are you still printing at 360?  If you let it print at 720, there should be very little difference in the prints (between antialiasing on/off).  The defaults are designed to work well with the native (highest) driver resolution which would be 720 PPI on an Epson and 600 on most Canons and HPs.  If you print at lower resolution than that, the antialiasing can make things a bit softer.

Of course, if your photos are mostly of things that don't have repeating patterns like tile roofs, brick or cobblestone surfaces, buildings with balcony railings, etc. then you don't really need the AA anyway.  AA is designed to make sure you don't try to render more detail than can reliably be rendered in a given area (pixel) so I prefer to leave it on.  But when rendering images of foliage and high frequency random patterns, they can look sharper if you ignore that and turn it off.

Mike

That's an ungodly amount of sharpening in your Lighroom examples.  To me they look terrible: like everything has frost on it.  And Lightroom has halo artifacts around all the branches on the first example whereas Qimage doesn't.  Some of what you are seeing as "detail" is just sharpening artifacts in the LR examples but if you like that look...

Everything is an option in Qimage so from the main menu, go to Edit, Preferences, Printing Options, and (top right) turn the antialiasing off.

If you really like that "speckled look", while you are in there you can drop down the Deep Focus Sharpening and change it to normal USM.  Just be aware the halo artifacts will come into play when you do that so test one feature at a time.

P.S.  If you really want to get the best of Qimage, don't set Qimage's print res to 360 as you say: use 720 and let it do the best it can with your printer.  No need to "hobble" it to 360.  If you let it do 720, the above (antialiasing) would never have been an issue.

Regards,
Mike

No, just what you see in that tab.  Only the more common EXIF fields are available.

Regards,
Mike

Thanks for sharing!  Glad it is working well in that scenario.

Regards,
Mike

To print to file you have to print.  Did you click the print button to print the page(s)?  After you do that, there's a dialog where you can specify if you want to "rip" the prints from the page or print whole pages.  And when it prints, then it creates the pages.

Mike

Please let me know what you are trying.  The best way to do this is to click "File", "Print to", and choose "File"... or drop down "Printer" and select "Print to File".  Then when you print, you can print whole pages to JPEG files.

Regards,
Mike

Of course.  Click the AI Copilot button at the top of the UI and uncheck "Printer profile issues".

Regards,
Mike