I have an invitation to renew my copy of qimage Ultimate, but when I enter the link given I get a warning that the security cerificate is invalid.

Surely clogs are mostly in the printing head, not the cartridge or tubes. There's only one black printing head (that's why you have to swap the inks) so unclogging the head should usually clear for both the black inks?
 

try to avoid scanners with a fluorescent light source - these can cause trouble with UV output causing optical brighteners in some papers to emit additional blue light. I bought a cheap LED light source scanner to get round that problem when I used to use Profile Prism.

I took a section of a 12Mpixel image I'm familiar with, equivalent to the whole being printed at A1 size, and printed that through the three programs. That would be roughly 120 ppi by my calculations. Printer was an Epson 3880, Epson inks and the paper was a smooth paper, not textured. While the images weren't absoloutely identical, there was no way to say one was better than the others. I know what I'm doing - I've been using Lightroom since the version 0 beta, Qimage from its first version, and versions of Photoshop from version 5.5 (which was truly dire at resizing for print!)

comparisons with out of date versions of Photoshop and Lightroom aren't really helpful - recent versions of Lightroom and Photoshop have significantly improved their print output. I recently did a quick check between current versions of QI, Lightroom and Photoshop when preparing a talk on printing for a local camera club, and found very little difference between the prints.
(Two differences that do remain are:
Qimage can retain layouts for later reuse
the Adobe programs can output a 16 bit file for further processing if you want it
)

thanks Fred!

Is it possible to export layouts from Qimage on one PC, and import them on another?

I'm giving a talk on printing to a local camera club shortly and would like to be able to demonstrate some of Qimage Utimate capabilities, and layout is something it handles well in comparison with lightroom or Photoshop.

(the installation I use is on a desktop, and I'll be using a laptop for the presentation. I don't really want to have to recreate the greeting card layouts!)

image files don't have dpi (dots (of ink) per inch) they have ppi (pixels per inch). to print to most 1440 dpi printers you're not really going to see any benefit over 360 pixels per inch in the spooled image file (assuming an Epson printer).
One of the regular support crew will probably be around later to give you a more detailed answer (or there's the mythdpi pages at http://www.rideau-info.com/photos/mythdpi.html )

I'm not aware of any way of getting a 16 bit TIFF file out of Qimage at any stage. I can select TIFF, but only get 8 bits.

Thanks Terry - I do have a similar set of small grey 'cards' that I use in the studio or the garden, but for reason given earlier I consider them much less useful in the landscape.

with respect to 8 or 16 bit editting - whether 8 bit suffices depends on the changes you still want to make using tools not available in Qimage.

with respect to setting/correcting white balance, the Qimage documentation on transferring white balance settings says
'Just find any one image in the entire batch that has a known white/gray object, use the dropper on that image and apply the white balance fix to the entire set of photos at once. Voila! All your photos now have the proper white balance!'.
How do you apply the white balance fix from one image to another, please?

having a gray swatch with you helps if you're in the same lighting as the image you want to photograph - if you're under a tree canopy and the subject is in open sunlight the other side of a river, its not going to be much help. (Much like the reason incident light meters were much inferior to spot meters before meters got embedded into the camera.)

I know there's another topic on raw development currently running, but I thought it better not to mix this contrarian view!
I've been using Qimage since it was just Qimage, and didn't have an editor at all, just did layout and resampling far better than Photoshop (version 5 at the time), and was more than a little bit cheaper than Genuine Fractals. I was in the early stages of experimenting with moving from darkroom to inkjet printing. It still does layout and resampling better than Photoshop, so I still use the current version of Qimage Ultimate.
I periodically have a look at the editting facilities in Qimage, and still find them lacking relative to Photoshop and Lightroom. For me there are two issues, one on input, and one on editting and output:

• input: its difficult to select white balance. Its improved a lot from the first version, but it still requires you to find a neutral target in the image, and many of my images don't have a neutral target in them. I can't find a set of presets that can be used and tweaked, and I can't find a way to apply the white balance from one image to all other images in the same sequence.
• editting/output: when you switch from the raw processor to the inbuilt editor, you drop down to 8 bits per pixel, so large changes can result in posterisation. Similarly when you output a file for further processing, you drop down to 8 bits per pixel.

I don't expect QU to offer every editting facility I want - that's not its aim, but I would like it to allow me maximum flexibility to use other tools to get to the image I want.
Now that it is adding more tools in the raw processor, its getting potentially more useful than 'just' the print file generator (I'd like to be able to use TTS, and maybe the RAW noise suppression), but the 8 bit file is too much of a limitation, leading to a greater risk of posterisation in later stages of editting. I don't expect Qimage to do all the editting, just to fit in as one tool in the box; while it only outputs an 8 bit file, it doesn't fit well.

Thanks Mike!
yes, that's exactly what I needed, hidden in plain sight!

After some experiments, I can get it to almost work

What I want is a set of output images sized at 240dpi (occasionally 360), and (and typically 30" on the long side - all the same in each processing run). The smaller sides will vary (and I don't know beforehand what they are).

I have to set a paper size that the image will fit on before I start otherwise it creates multiple pages (even though I've set it to print to a file), however, if I set the page size to unnecessarily wide, it will add white borders to fill the unneeded space. If I have batch of images of differing aspect ratios there's no way I can see to automtically set the 'width' to fit. In practice, I will almost always have images of differing apsect ratios.

Unless there's a way to specify that the file should hold just the image, and shrink the image (paper size) to fit, I'm always going to end up with white borders on two sides of most images. 

Of course I can 'fix' this by opening the output files and cropping manually to the image border and saving again. I'd rather avoid having to do this if possible. (Or perhaps there's an easy way to 'trim' a file of excess surrounding white space (or red or whatever) space?)

I hope that explains what I'm trying to do.

Sorry for delay, but Qimage is not doing anything sensible with this file, so I've decided to give up for tonight (UK time) and comeback to it tomorrow, starting with an install of the new version