Mike Chaney's Tech Corner

Hi Folks!
I use qimage to print to a bunch of wide format canons with very few problems, BUT my new printer (canon c810 with fiery controller) installed a few months ago is having issues & Qimage doesn't seem to like it... Newest version (2024.102) I'm seeing crashes quite often while trying to process print jobs to this machine - just freezes (no error) & sits indefinitely until you kill it from the task manager. It seems specific to this particular printer, and possibly specific to win11. It doesn't usually crash the first time you print something, it seems to crash on subsequent prints & might be more likely if images have been replaced or updated in the queue - hard to nail down. It seems to crash part way through processing, not immediately when you hit print.

Thought it might be the fiery that qimage isn't playing nicely with, as it's settings are more dynamic than my wide format printers - I can't lock in a preset in qimage the way I can with my wide format printers as the driver dynamically pulls config from the machine and the rip. BUT this is also only happening on my newer workstations - My initial install on an older i7-7700 win10 seemed to have no problems whatsoever, then I switched to an i5 10400 win 11 & the crashing started, so I built a new workstation (ryzen 9700x win11) a few days ago but & crashing persists...
Help!
Terry

I'm not familiar with Canon's fiery controller but that sounds like something that could play differently with Windows (and hence Qimage).  The first thing to try is going to Edit, Preferences, Multithreading, Print Processing Threads, and set it to 1 (single core).  Try printing that way for a while and see if it corrects the problem.  It'll print slower but if that fiery server can't handle multithreading like a normal printer driver, that might be the culprit.

Regards,
Mike

Thanks Mike! I'll play around with it some more and report back once I have an update...