I'm a (hopefull) new Poser artist and I'm wondering which Poser version people recommend 4, or 5. I don't have anything right now so it won't be any upgrade situation. I've read some negative comments about Poser 5 and I'm considering just going with Poser 4. Any thoughts?

I have both and to be truthful i like 4 better because its faster.Aso since its yur first you ight want to try it frst its esier to use.

I'll be the counterpoint and say that I do like P5, there are so many things to recommend it. so if you are starting from scratch and your computer is fairly new,(built in the last year or so) with plenty of memory, (min 512mb) all the new features are a definate + the material room and the new library system alone are worth the upgrade, and the firefly renderer blows the old renderer away and if you want to use it like p4 you can as it has both renderers. if you want to use poser for posing and rendering in another program the easy answer used to be P4 with or without propack, but now thats even becoming a grey area, as plugins for p5 are beginning to show up as well as a recent announcememt that Vue D'Esprit. is coming out with a free upgrade that will allow direct import from P5. sure p5 is still not without its bugs but P4 has its fair share as well, its just been around longer so the work arounds have been in place longer.

Here's an idea: click on the "Search" link and do a search for "Poser 5" and look through the past messages. This question is asked practically every week, so your chances of getting a good answer diminish more and more. Do the search and see what everyone has to say.

This question would be a lot simplier if Curious Labs did the right thing, and priced Poser 4 as a intro level program, say for $49.95 or so. But I think you can only buy Poser 4 combined with ProPack (which i always thought rather worthless), at times Poser 5 has been cheaper, too. So, no good answer to this question, Poser 5 does seem to work for some people, I even got some renders out of it myself. ;-) Poser 5 is going to have a lot of stuff that you will have trouble figuring out, though. I also don't know if the Poser 5 renderer is better than say, the Bryce renderer, but it is much faster, and far easier to setup. I still mostly use 4 myself (I have all of 'em), at least (like wdupre said) I know where the bugs are. But I still think Curious Labs is shooting itself in the foot by not selling a cheap version of 4, but the window for that is passing too, a DAZ studio is going to be free, I understand. It is the ever popular "Give away the razor, and sell the blades" trick, which work for inkjet printers too, and is fine by me, as I make blades.