"No one wants to end up owning a Betamax in a VHS world." On the other hand, who wants to be VHS in a DVD world? I've been holding off getting a DVD recorder because formats haven't settled down to a winner, whether it's + or - (even though some recorders do both). While I've been waiting for a winner in that format, there will soon be two competing high-definition recording formats supported by different movie studios. At the same time VHS recorders are losing favor and they're harder to find, with fewer options when you have a problem with one manufacturer's quality. The writing is on the wall and I'll have to someday transfer all my thousands of videos to a disk format, but I don't want to do it with a format that will vanish in a half dozen years. Unfortunately, the world is getting more and more fast paced and things will constantly change. There's not much that any of us can do about that other than go back to the woods and leave the technological world behind us. I'm not particularly worried about DS & Poser splitting the community. The split won't happen in a real sense until DS is a serious alternative to Poser. Right now, DS is an alternative for someone who doesn't have Poser or has an older version. DS doesn't yet have the breadth of all of Poser's features. Even if DS can match Poser 1-for-1, that's still not enough reason for a massive switch. For DS to be the dominant posing program, it's got to do something better, and everthing else at least as well as Poser. DS has to do something so much better that a Poser user would have to be awful stubborn not to switch. If that is the case, where is the downside? The big split I see happening is not DS/Bryce vs. Poser/Vue, but in Poser content. Two different rendering alliances, that use the same content, are not going to split the Poser community other than those that have an emotional attachment to the software they use. That's no different than the higher end 3D application snobs who sneer at Poser users for not being as good solely because of the application. I'm not going to be siding with anybody ten years from now who thinks they can make a prettier picture with Victoria XIII in Poser 12 than in DS 7 or vice versa. The killer change in DS that can wean people off Poser will likely be advances in figure content. Although I've never heard anybody from DAZ say this, I have little doubt that the main reason for creating DS is so that DAZ can do new things with their figures that they cannot do with Poser. DAZ is probably making more money from their content than CL is with Poser (just a guess on my part--I don't have any facts). Poser is a one-time expense while content is a forever ongoing expense. Without DAZ having their own Poser style program, they are dependent totally on Poser's future. It's not a good move being tied to another business for one's survival. As has been mentioned, there were concerns for a while over Poser becoming another abandoned program and that would eventually have killed DAZ. Even if Poser continues a long healthy life, DAZ is limited in what they can do with their figures by the limitations inherent in the Poser program and CL has no inherent need to improve those figures. Neither Poser 5 or 6 made any real changes to the figure rigging. New versions of Poser have added some capabilities and provided better rendering options, but the things that make Poser what it is haven't changed much since version 4. If DS adopts new posing techniques that change how Poser content is made, new figure content will not be usable in subsequent versions of Poser unless CL adopts the same changes. That will cause a separation between the two programs. That will take many years to happen. DAZ won't abandon Poser customers until their purchases become too small a part of their business to bother accommodating. That will only happen if the new figures are so much better than the current crop that most Poser users will be compelled to become DS users. I don't see a downside to that if DS does the job right and there is a solid reason to use DS. I'll let the real Poser experts predict what those advances could be. All of that is many years away. DS will probably have a pay version, but will probably be cheaper than future versions of Poser because DS is subsidized by DAZ content. Poser has to earn a profit wholly from sales of the program. Much as I hate to disagree with Anton, I believe that Poser content creators will follow DAZ's lead. It's what the bulk of them do now and there's not much reason to expect that to change, particularly if there are advances to figures that both users and content creators want. Right now, DS has a ways to go to seriously challenge Poser. That's why I'm still not emotionally charged over the two programs. The best or most popular program will eventually win out. That's not a bad thing. It's not as if there will be a 50/50 split. Somebody is going to have the predominant posing software. That's the software that will have the most content.

My visual indexes of Poser content are at http://www.sharecg.com/pf/rgagnon