All in all I'm pleased with Poser 5 and the FireFly rendering engine. Actually, I've uninstalled P4 and I've never used the P4 rendering engine over FireFly. I'm not saying that I haven't had my fair share of issues, but I've usually found work-arounds. Now, a lot of people don't like work arounds and that's fine, but like I said, I like P5 so I'm will to find the work arounds.

The cloth room, with some of the amazing dynamic cloth products available here, is awesome. And it really isn't that difficult to get good results. Actually hmann's Dynamic Clothing Pak had an excellent tutorial on how to get great results. Also, PhilC has excellent tutorials available for the cloth room.

The hair, on the other hand, has some room for improvement - well at least the "sculpting" part of it. It's still a bit out of my reach, but I'll admit I haven't spent too much time in that room.

From what Ive read in the Beta forums, if youre running a Win 9x or ME operating system, youre more susceptible to errors, and I think that has a lot to do because of Posers and Windows memory management (or the lack there of). Now, there were some people that have had great success with the Win 9x series, Im just giving you a little heads up. My set up is a P4 1.6 with 1GB RAM and yes, RAM does make a huge difference in rendering time.

I guess it all comes down to the simple question "Do you have the patients to learn the ins and outs of Poser 5? If you do, I think youll be pleased if not Id go for the P4 Pro-Pack. And from my understanding of DAZ Studio (and yes I am dying to get my grubby little hands on it) the initial beta is going to have limited functionality. So, youre still going to have to rely on Poser for a while. Now, DAZ Studio is going to have many huge advantages the one Im really waiting on is Open GL support!

Anywho Ive had way too much coffee today and Im just kind of rambling now, so Ill end it here. I hope this has helped you in some way. Again, I'm pleased with my purchase, and I would recommend it. You can take a look at my gallery to see some P5 renders. There are a couple of renders in there that have some post work, but that's something I'm still learning, so for the most part they are straight FireFly renders.