Yeah 3.x is a different, much older version of Qt. So it's not surprising. I doubt 4.1 will help, there were no Qt image plugins or build changes.
You could try getting some debug output using the environment variable QT_DEBUG_PLUGINS=1 to see why Qt is failing to load its image plugins on your system.
Something like
Code:
set QT_DEBUG_PLUGINS=1
calibre-debug -c "from PyQt5.Qt import *; app = QApplication([]); print(QImageReader.supportedImageFormats())"