Okay -- I've been reading all the post about Ultimate and am disappointed at the negativity that it has generated.

Let's get real here:  The other versions of Qimage are not going away and will still get updated (for free) so Mike has not gone back on his word.  That's pretty easy to understand.

So the real issue is whether a discount is offered to us loyal members of the Qimage family.  So what would a good discount be?  Half price?  That's 45 bucks.  I'm sorry but the last couple years have been horrible for me financially yet $45 is not something to get worked up about.

I agree that from a marketing point of view, it would have been better to offer an upgrade path but the dollar amount is pretty insignificant and that's Mike's biz decision. So be it.

I've been a Qimage user since 2001 and it has been one of the best deals in software that I've encountered and I, as others, mostly just use it for printing.  There is nothing that I've read about the new ultimate edition that I feel that I need to continue to easily print the highest quality photos to sell or display.  I will not lose anything by not upgrading and I will gain little by upgrading.

YET -- though I haven't even downloaded and tried the Ultimate edition -- I will happily upgrade to the new edition - mostly to support Mike and his company (though he probably makes tons more than I do).  Excellent software at an extremely low cost plus with personal involvement from the developer is so rare these days that any devoted loyal long time user should have no problem moving to the Ultimate edition.

Our photography and our photos are very personal and important to probably every user of Qimage.  Mike's software makes MY photos look good.  My good looking photos makes ME look good. Why wouldn't I want to support Mike's further attempt at creating even better software?  For the record, I also use CS5 and ACDSee -- both extremely important to my work flow.  Yet I don't feel the loyalty to those two companies as I do to Mike and DDI.

So a heartfelt thanks to Mike! And it's probably time for us all to stop complaining and either upgrade to Ultimate or keep using the still excellent other versions of Qimage (with their still free upgrades).

Will having your profile for my Canon 5D Mark II and 7D give me better Raw results than just using Ultimate as is?  If so, I think that's a great idea

I have been a Studio / Qimage user for a long time.

Andy

Hi Mike,

I appreciate you thinking of incentives for current studio users after all. I still think a proper (paid!) upgrade path would have been the way to go, but you have made your decision not to do that, fair enough.

As for the free profiles: For me personally that won’t be an incentive, as I already bought the profile for my camera a long time ago; mainly to support you by the way, since I don’t use Qimage for RAW processing. But if enough others find it appealing, maybe that’s the way to go.

As an alternative to an upgrade you could toss in a few extra years of upgrades for existing users. But I have a hunch that this would not fit into your business plan either.

I ran into another somewhat related problem: For me as a printing-only user it seems that the new program has not much more to offer at the moment than QS. So I shouldn’t really try QU out now to get a better idea about the program, because if more printing related features are added in the future I couldn’t try them out then, since I already installed the trial once (I assume).

So I'll just wait and see what's coming in the future, I guess.

Best,
Marc