Quote - it's become clear that Daz renders "hard items" much better. 

Hold on there!

You're not even rendering at the default settings in Poser, but even if you were, how does comparing the renderers at default settings mean anything at all?

Second, you're not actually talking about "hard items" - you're talking about how your color maps look, which is directly impacted by the values you've got set and should not be using.

Texture filtering is a complicated subject, and is necessary for images that produce moire patterns. Otherwise, turn it off. Poser makes a mistake enabling that by default and it drives me batty explaining this every month for the past 2 years.

Have a look here at some "hard items" rendered in Firefly:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/full.php?image_id=1840092

I had to use post processing to create some subtle blur and dispersion, because Firefly made the details so sharp they were not recognizable as a photo, which is what I was going for.

Look at the "EN951" near the tail. That was impossibly sharp edged black on white. I had to use a filter to make it look the way cameras produce black on white.

Look at the radio antenna, how smooth and anti-aliased it appears. You can't set pixel samples at 2 and then complain that Firefly doesn't anti-alias hard things well.

As for mis-shape - well if that product was designed to be used in Poser then it should have been tested with smoothing turned on. There is no reason for shapes to become bloated. There is a good reason to use smoothing. Compare the stove exhaust pipe on the two renders. The Daz version is not smoothly curved, while the Poser version is. If you were going to pick which one does hard things more realistically, I'd say that smoothing blows the doors off not smoothing. Now maybe you can enable that in Daz, in which case that's another example of operator error.

I think both renderers can produce detail and sharpness that is perfectly adequate. I know Poser can produce realistic shapes from low-polygon props if the model author knows what he's doing and is designing for Poser. Otherwise, if the modeler does not know what he's doing or is not aware that he is designing for Poser (as is common with freebies and props made for sub-D capable renderers) then you get bloat.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)