Are you saying that the print preview shows up fine in the Epson print preview window? Because at that point, Qimage is done with it.
Exactly right. When you initially said the "processing" completed instantly, I thought you were talking about Qimage processing the image(s) and you were referring to Qimage's live view (calling that the "preview"). If you activated "Print Preview" in the driver and you are saying the print shows in the
Epson driver preview, that is the Epson preview showing you what Qimage sent to the driver (and proving that Qimage did its job correctly and sent the print as instructed). If you see the print on the Epson driver preview and then the driver won't print it, there is nothing I can do about that: that is not a Qimage issue because as Mel said, Qimage is completely out of the loop at that point and has already done its job properly. When the Epson driver preview comes up and shows you what the print should look like on the paper and then
the driver doesn't print what it is showing you, that is 100% a driver issue.
So if we are interpretting your situation correctly now in that the Epson driver preview shows you the print(s) on the page(s) like you expect but then the driver doesn't produce its own previewed prints, the issue is between the driver and the printer not Qimage and the printer. At that point, it is irrelevant whether or not other software can print: the driver has already shown you what should be printed... and it isn't printing it. Qimage optimizes/resamples and sends more data than a "dumb printing" process like Photoshop, Lightroom, and other programs that just dump the original image to the driver. That's kinda like saying "My car only dies when I put premium gas in it so there must be something wrong with the gas". When in fact, there is an issue with the car that only surfaces when it tries to increase performance to make use of the detected higher octane gas.
There is one more thing you can check (
and this is the TLDR part). I don't normally have to mention this anymore because most printers no longer have an issue with this but since that printer is so old, it may be relevant... Have you tried both spool modes? Meaning, click "Edit", "Preferences", "Printing Options" in Qimage and near the bottom, try both "EMF" and "Raw" selections for the spool type. One may work better than the other. Old printers/drivers used to have a problem when software sent a lot of data (like Qimage will in order to get the best quality). Sometimes when those old drivers received more than a set amount of data, the driver couldn't handle the calculations needed during printing and the driver would run out of memory. Depending on the driver, one selection (EMF or Raw) may work better than the other and alleviate this problem. Usually the raw setting worked better but believe it or not, some old drivers were "happier" with the EMF setting.
Also, hardly anyone uses a 32 bit computer (and operating system) anymore but maybe I should ask because I know you are using an 18 year old printer... Is your Windows 32 or 64 bit? If the old 32 bit, the above paragraph is even more applicable because the native 32 bit (vs 64 bit) printer drivers really had a problem processing large amounts of data. It's not that they
can't do it, just that on older systems you may have to play with the spool setting to find the right choice where that's generally not necessary with new printers
and new 64 bit operating systems.
Mike