I own Carrara 3 Studio and Vue5, as well as Lightwave, but that is another story. In my own experience Carrara is much quicker than Vue in most areas. Of course each serves a different purpose. I like Vue for what it does, but Carrara was already a sweet app, now it looks even better. From what I have seen so far of C5, it is a no brainer upgrade for me. I was a beta tester for C4, but I had to drop out of the beta program due to some things that were going on in my family life. After that I continued to use Lightwave, since I had used it for so long. However, I did use C3 for one job--it paid for itself on that one job. It will cost me $299 to get C5 Pro. $99 for the Standard. Pro has some features that Standard doesnt obviously. A lot of them I wont use, such as import/export. LW import is covered in standard. I prefer to model in Lightwave, although Hexagon now has my attention as well after using the demo. The important things missing in Standard appear to be the surface and edge selection in the modeler. However, if I get Hexagon as companion it will be $169. Hexagon plus Standard will be better for my needs than just having Pro and it will be cheaper that way. I am glad to see that they offer more than one version. I am also glad to see that they did not forget the previous users. I just fired up C3 again. I am still amazed at the render speed. For most of my work I would have been content with using Lightwave to model and C3 to render, but there was no reliable way to get the models in. Now, I am ready to get back into Carrara. Once again I figure even if I dont stick with it, one job will easily pay for the upgrade. Also, if I can get into Hexagon more, I may end up using it instead of Lightwave to model with. From what I have seen it is a powerful modeler. At the moment I am still using LW 7.5. To upgrade it would be $399. But I dont even come close to using all the features now. So I am holding off on that one. Instead I will just use C5 and Lightwave together and perhaps get Hexagon to fiddle with until I can get up to speed with it. I guess if you are a hobbyist the decision can be tougher. I am lucky enough to make money doing this. For me it is an absolute no brainer. I look forward to revisiting Carrara and implementing it more in my work. Good job Eovia!!