(Big fat disclosure that I'll spit up before I say another word - I used to work for DAZ, and on DAZ|Studio). D|S and Poser each have their strengths and weaknesses. Poser's strength is its longevity, and the fact that it does have some nice tools built-in (AOL/IBL lighting, Joint and Material editing, etc). It can also pretty much read any Poser-formatted file out there without conversion. Poser's weaknesses? Dynamic Hair/Clothing is nice, but will eat a lot of extra CPU cycles and takes a lot of work to get working and looking right. This is not to say that they're useless, but be sure to budget the extra time. It takes longer to load, longer to render, and is a bit heavier on system resources. A lot of this can be mitigated however by having lots of external runtimes (while keeping the built-in one as small as possible), and throttling back some of the render and other settings. D|S Strengths? I'll have to list 'em: * It costs very little. Sure, if you want more than just basic functionality, you need to purchase plug-ins, but this allows you to get only what you want/need from it, instead of having to buy an entire suite loaded with things that you mostly won't use. Many former plugins (e.g. D-Form, which is an advanced magnet/morph-maker) are now free. * It goes easier on the computer's resources. I can happily run the latest version of DAZ|Studio with very little slow-down at all on an old Dell Inspiron Pentium III 866 MHz laptop with only 512 MB of RAM. This includes building scenes with, say, Vicky 4 in it. Only Poser 4 could keep up speed-wise on such puny computer specifications. * It has a better codebase. With its modular foundation, it can be built upon and remain flexible for a long time to come. It was written from the ground up to be compatible with Windows and OSX (and even Linux should they decide to port it), becuase it uses straight-up C++ and Qt, both of which are universal across platform types. This means that it behaves more consistently whether you're on a Mac or in Windows. Because of the discipline that the coding team put into place, it is almost completely free of the cruft and kludges that come back to haunt most programmers as time goes by. (while this paragraph is of little use to users, it does translate to better performance and more stability over time). D|S does have a few weaknesses, however: It lacks some of the tools that Poser comes with (most notably dynamics), though this is changing. It also has to translate files written for Poser. While it does so very well, there are likely to be a few Poser files that will give it trouble from time to time (e.g. *.obz, *.pzz, and the like). I use Poser for compatibility testing, and little else nowadays. Even though my Mac can run either without slowing down much, D|S has a much better response for me, and I already know it inside and out (I know Poser almost as well, but chalk it up to my biases :) ). Cheers! /P