I am thinking of buying Poser 7 but have heard some comments that it has a few problems.

Is this true or is the product worth purchasing?

Yes it has problems but they're not bad enough to not buy it IMO.
The biggest issue for me is that it can't render out a 300 dpi image even if you've set everything correctly it still only renders out at 72 dpi, so I still use P6 for work that I do for customers, other than that it's a good bit of kit!

I understand from e-frontier that this is a known issue and will be fixed in SR1, whenever that will be!

It's certainly a better release than either 5 or 6 were in their initial release!

There are some issues.
Dynamic cloth has been reported to have some problems, especially when using multiple dynamic cloth items in one scene.
The DPI issue thefixer mentions (which is easy to work around, just multiply the height/width of your image by the DPI number, and enter the result as pixels).
Saving an image as .JPG always saves at low quality, with artefacts.
Some users have reported sluggish user interface response. 
When deleting an object/figure, Poser 7 needs some time to organize its undo buffer
The advanced hardware shaded preview doesn't work on every OpenGL enabled graphics card, and can slow things down horribly, even on fast (nVidia 7900GS) to very fast (nVidia 7800GTX) graphics cards.

None of these issues will prevent you from making the scene and rendering it, except the dynamic cloth bug.

The new features (standalone renderer, memory usage of up to 4 GB, the morph tool, collections) are very nice indeed. They offset the issues IMO.

The issues are known at e-frontier and they're working on a service pack. Expected to be released somewhere in March.

I am on Vista and was ready to toss the whole thing because it wold not work. A very smart person told me to change the default OpenGL render option to SreeD (Render settings - Preview). Now it works. So . . . there was a huge Vista bug to a major setting (the open that lets you move about and click on things), but it is resolved easily. 

It is disappointing that this did not work out of the bix and that many people eed to do exactly what you are doing - ask for help.

Why can't software developers all just get along?  : )

Now that it works it seems excellent . . . except that all of my wonderfully sorted content is in Poser 6 . . . . 

Why doesn't Poser just "upgrade" and take my P6 content and import it? That is my biggest disappointment.

Actually, I think the way e-frontier handles the content is better than "simply upgrading".
By adding an external runtime that points to the Poser 6 root folder, you'll have your neatly organized Poser 6 runtime linked to P7, AND you can still run Poser 6 for things that Poser 7 doesn't do well - such as dynamic cloth calculations.
The other way around also works - if you add the Poser 7 runtime as an external runtime to Poser 6, you'll have the Poser 7 figures available in Poser 6.

Poser 6 with all service paks is the most stable version today.
For me, Poser 7 is just an upgrade to P6. The little (slow and bugy) gimmicks Poser 7 adds on top of P6 are not worth the money, IMO.

All Poser releases have been buggy.
Makes me wonder what sort of testing and quality contril happens before release.
Some P7 bugs are so obvious  e frontier must have known them before release, what were they thinking of?   $$$$$
It's like releasing a car to the market when you know the brakes don't work properly - not our problem, let a few accidents happen and then we'll release SR1, SR2, SR3, SR4.............
We can sue for faulty goods and services, why is e frontier exempt?

To be fair, all software has bugs. Question is, do they interfere with the basic stated functions of the program? No, you can't sue software makers for releasing crap. Check any EULA... odds are perfect that there is a "we don't warrant jack sh!t in here!" type of phrase in there. Yer spends yer money, you gets what shows up. [i]Caveat Emptor[/i] and all that jazz... This is why I let everyone else be lab rats before I lay down the dough for a commercial s/w package (now if it's free and/or Open Source, okay... I can deal with bugs and likely fix the things if I can get at the source code). This is why on the professional level, most high-dollar apps (for any purpose) have demos, and why the really expensive stuff usually means that you get a demo server/desktop to test it on before deciding to write any checks. /P

***"To be fair, all software has bugs. Question is, do they interfere with the basic stated functions of the program?"

***When I spend 3+ hours setting up a scene and it won't even render in Firefly or P4 then, no, it does not perform; period.
I think the ability to render is a "basic stated function".

I thought the basic stated function was to Pose and animate...and its not great at that either lol! ;0)

macmullin: this part of Poser 7 is almost completely identical to Poser 6. The only dfference is in the Visible tag - visibility is now animatable. For the rest things are exactly the same.

The main issue that I've personally run into with P7 has to do with switching runtimes, and then getting a "build folder menu" flag in the library -- after which P7 will crash out to the desktop.  However, open up P7 immediately afterwards and it works perfectly.  I just have to let it crash once, and then I'm good to go for the rest of the session after re-starting the program.

The other issue that I've noted is the well-known problem of using the delete key on a figure -- and the delete key not working.  You have to go up to the menu bar and select "Delete Figure" or "Delete Object" as a work-around.

But all in all -- I HIGHLY recommend P7.  In overall performance -- and in spite of a few bugs -- it leaves other versions way behind.  Especially when it's loaded onto a decent machine.

I do not have P7 and even I can answer this basic question.......

The question actually is not, is poser & buggy, but is ANY version of poser NOT buggy lol.

The answer is no.

I have Poser 7, and I'd say it's definately worth buying if you have the extra cash. Don't break your budget for it, but if you can, it's a nice upgrade. I havn't had any problems with it being buggy, I'm running a PC with XP home edition. But, then again, I'm hardly a power user.

I won't buy another version until the P4 rendering engine is as fast as it was with P4 and Pro Pack. Posers 5 and 6 both take twice as long ro render (and that's with the quick P4 rendering engine...I'm not even talking about Firefly - though I would expect that to take longer). Anything else - IMHO - is simply not an improvement if the base program runs like a slug. Sorry for the rant ;)

Quote - I won't buy another version until the P4 rendering engine is as fast as it was with P4 and Pro Pack.

I assume that one item in the above statement was a typo, and that you meant to say: "until the P7 rendering engine is as fast as it was with P4 and Pro Pack."  Then again, perhaps you meant the P4-emulation option from within P7.

In my experience, P7 leaves all former versions in the dust, render-speed wise.  Same goes for when you are arranging your scene.  But then again: I haven't used P4 very much in the last six years or so -- so it's tough for me to compare.  I haven't used MS Word '97 in a long time, either.  That was several versions ago.

P7 has multi-threaded rendering.  It works great on a machine with that capability.

It has several issues with the RayTrace engine and issues with the Libraries and issues with how it searches for files and many people are reporting inconsistant crashing and render lockups.

Pretty much all of these issues and more are being worked on by e-f, just how many will get fixed in SR1 has yet to be seen. Their message to me indicated that the RayTrace engine and library issues are taking fore front in their endevors.

So far I have tried now to Render FOUR scenes, not just a character on a blank color background but full scenes ranging from 80meg to 200meg and complete with background props, clothing, hair and mulitple characters - Poser 7 has froze on all four and refused to render them, however Poser 6 has opened and rendered all four successfully and at even higher render settings then I had set in Poser 7 (actually, at one point I lowered ray bounce to 1 and increased shadow bias to 1 and lowered pixel sampling to 3, and P7 still froze, but P6 had no trouble)

Also to Alpha Channel issue, I think maybe e-f now understands what the trouble is there...don't know if they intend on fixing it however.

So don't let others mis-guide you and say it works as advertised, the e-f engineers KNOW the bugs and that it is sub standard, or at least the ones they recognize so far. Actually as far as I can tell; it's a broken version of Poser 6

I've experienced no problems with raytracing.  Although I have had a couple of render "lock-ups" -- which consisted of clicking on the 'render' button -- and then having nothing happen.  It wasn't actually a 'lock-up' per se: it was more like a refusal to begin rendering.

However, once again: I found that if I exited P7, and then started it back up again -- after the freash start-up, the scene rendered out just fine.

Is P7 perfect?  Nope.  Is it an improvement over former versions?  Definitely.  Yes.  And then some.

svdl...thank you for the info - I needed the information for my product readme file. :-)

Dale

Thanks Xeno, that was what I meant. Wow, P7 will render a scene for you as fast as P4?! I've got Propack, P5 and P6 all loaded onto my computer...and when I take a scene and render it in Propack (p4) it will take - let's say 32 seconds as an example - then when I try to render it in P5 (using the P4 rendering engine) it will take well over a minute...and P6 is almost always dead on to take twice as long - like 64 seconds (Again, using the P4 rendering engine). If there's some trick to getting my 3.2 Ghz Pentium4 with 2 gigs of ram to get rendering speeds lower with Poser5+ versions, I'd love to hear it.

I can't speak to whether Poser7 is actually faster or not when it comes to using the P4 rendering engine within P7...I've heard a lot of people claim that it is...but whenever I've asked someone to test it for me (even against Poser6) it seems that render times have either not changed, they are even slower, or those that I ask don't seem to get back to me. For this reason I have not, nor do I intend to purchase Poser7

I've talked to a lot of people that don't seem to think this is a big deal...but as an animator, doubling render times with newer versions is a BIG DEAL. Instead of a clip taking 2 hours to render, I'm now looking at 4+ if I choose to use Poser 5, 6, or - I imagine - 7. Now if I were just rendering single-frame images of Naked Vicki in a Temple...well I could care less about rendering speeds.

It just seems to me that if I have to keep Propack, P5, AND P6 all loaded onto my computer to get the results I need...well the upgrades just don't strike me as sufficient. I'm surprised more people don't feel the same way...but everyone is entitled to their opinions. Unfortunately, it seems that nothing is going to happen with render speeds unless I start vocalizing my own though. Maybe someone at EF will finally get the message, and fix the problem with Poser8 so that I can FINALLY drop Propack into the recycling bin, God willing.

Again, sorry for the rant, I just don't think Poser7 looks like enough incentive to warrant another upgrade. I've listed my primary reasons, but I'll also say that the new features listed on the EF website did nothing to encourage my decision. As a matter of fact, I nearly turned red in the face when I saw that they added the Talk-Designer into Poser7 - something I consider to be completely unneccessary, and if it works anything like all the other "rooms" in Poser, will just eat up more system resources (whether I use it or not) in an attempt to undermine Daz as a competitor. It just strikes me as petty.

All that being said, I don't have a problem if EF adds new stuff with newer versions of Poser. Hell, I love dynamic cloth, hair, etc. But not every scene I make demands that I use it...so why can't I turn it off when I'm not using it? Or the Face Room? Or the Setup Room? These are the things that slow Poser down to a crawl...at least for me. I'm just saying, I want the option to turn them off so that Poser can run more efficiently without being drained of system resources by these things when I don't need them.

Now, before anyone tells me that Poser7 renders twices as fast as Poser4 (Or I actually use ProPack), I ask you to do a few render tests. And is there ANYONE who wouldn't like the option of "Turning off" these extra features/rooms when you don't need them? Until these things get some work done to them, my advice is not to upgrade.

Anyway, sorry for the coninued rant. I really don't mean to be Mr. Negativity here. I love Poser, I really do...I just think that it could be so much more than it is, and I was really disappointed when I saw what was being offered with Poser7. Hope this helps to at least spur the conversation in some constructive ways.

shrug

P7 works great for me -- outside of some semi-minor issues.  I wouldn't dream of abandoning P7 to return to P4 -- or even to return to P6, for that matter.  And I like P6 way better than I do P4.

But I like P7 far above and beyond all previous versions.  I expect that the 1st SR will likely address many of the issues that various people have been talking about.

Problems I've had with P7 are:
1/ Throwing me out to the desktop after a render without the chance of saving the work.
2/ Random crashing.
3/ Always defaults to 72dpi even when 300dpi is set.
4/ Delete not working properly.
5/ Selective render does not work at all, I just get a black screen.
6/ Workspace is very sluggish even on a fast PC.

All of the above problems are a pain but I live in hope that these issues will be fixed :)