Poser 6's renderer can make very nice pictures, if you don't use the canned render options. Usually I use raytracing, AO, a very fine "Min. Shading Rate" (to get rid of the grainy look), and realistically put up shadows (RL shadows have blurry outlines, and are not black, except in outer space). Unfortunately, when using all this Firefly gets very slow. I often have render times of several days, on a 4 GHz with 2 GB of RAM... Add atmospherics, and you can have a render running for over a week... Similar pics in Vue 5 take a couple of hours.   sigh

Anyway, to get a good result it takes knowing how Firefly will react, but it's not very difficult to learn. P6 has some quirks (strange behaviour of IBL and point lights, artefacts in AO) but you'll find quickly the way to bypass them and get the result you want.
I'd say, comparing the prices of Poser and Max, I think Max does a very bad job in rendering!...  :-D

Now, if only e-froniers would decide to fix Poser's memory problems so we can actually use it (for making a little more than naked Vickies in a temple with a sword...)
Poser is actually my favorite renderer.