Quote - As far as price point goes, is there really all that much difference between what CL charged for Poser ProPack?  IIRC, the price of the ProPack addon was somewhere in the $200 to $300 range.  For that you got the setup room, some plugins, and python scripting.  There might have been more that those seem to be the major ones. 

Now we have Poser Pro.  A $200 upgrade that can be likened to the old ProPack.  Only with this release you get a 64bit app, network rendering, HDRI, gamma correction and some plugins. 

If you compare the full cost of Poser Pro with the cost of buying Poser4 and ProPack, I don't think the price is all that different.

Umm.. no, you don't get a 64 bit app - you get a 64 bit render engine.  Poser Pro itself is still a 32 bit application.  Only firefly was ported to 64 bit - so all in all the speed differential is miniscule.  Network rendering is a coolio idea, but not really all that useful to most home users.  Gamma correction is ok I suppose for those that render in Poser, but having seen the results I can tell you that it certainly isn't anything that will make you go "Woah".

The firefly renderer really hasn't improved in it's quality much at all, in fact other than a slight difference in lighting the top end settings still won't produce the sort of renders you can get from other 3d apps. 

HDRI sounds cool - useless to me and probably to a lot of the other folks that use poser.  As far as the plugins are concerned, they are all for interfacing with other, higher end graphics apps so there not of much use either unless you have 3ds Max, Maya or Cinema 4d and want to use them with Poser.

So all in all not a lot of value there for most, certainly not worth paying $200 for an upgrade version of a program that only cost $150 to buy the full version, and no way in hades is it worth $500 for those poor souls that don't already own a copy of 7.

But my concern and the concern of most people I think is more aobut the future of Poser.  If Smith Micro thinks they can jack prices that hard with some minor bug fixes and upgrades, what will they do if they ever manage to start addressing some of Posers real troublesome areas and come up with say, a render engine that isn't out classed by virtually every other render engine out there, including ones you can get for free off of sourceforge?

Boggles the mind.

-Never fear, RenderDog is near!  Oh wait, is that a chew toy?  Yup. ok, nevermind.. go back to fearing...