Thank you, both of you, for your comments. aeilkema, D|S isn't intended, by itself, to compete with P5, but rather with P4. They will be adding dynamic capabilities to it in much the same way that they are added to lightwave or maya: plugins, both in house and third party. Prices on those will vary considerably. Import/Export will also be controlled via plug-ins. So when you turn the question around, you really do have to compare fairly with Poser 4. Peepers, Good notes, but, um -- and please, I am not being difficult here -- how does load time improve my experience in using it? If load time was a factor, I'd have abandonded PS long ago -- it still takes five minutes to load on my system because it parses my fonts folder. Faster navigation is cool. And yeah, it is beta -- I'm not taking that away from it. Poser is one tool of a suite -- has been since it was written. The orginal suite it was a tool of was Bryce, Carrara, and Poser (with Canoma in there as well). It is still under the tool design, they've simply recognized that it's common use has expanded far beyond the original purpose for the program. The benefit that DAZ has is that they are building the expandability into D|S. It's my hope that the plugins required to make it compatible wit my current version of Poser are, en masse, less expensive than buying poser itself. And since there's only one feature of Poser 5 that I make very little use of, that will likely be a hard pressed feat. Poser 5 takes 7.53 seconds to load on my system. Just timed it. For a good simple modeler, were you thinking "wings"? ;)

thou and I, my friend, can, in the most flunkey world, make, each of us, one non-flunkey, one hero, if we like: that will be two heroes to begin with. (Carlyle)