I've read, or I thought I've read, that you can put a hdri image on BB's envsphere and use that as a background and light source. I have no problem using it as a light source. I am having trouble with is as a background. It is always burry beyond recognition. my pixel samples are usually between 3 and 15 and my Min Shade Rating are between .11 and 1. I've tried with no texture filtering and with crisp. I've used the box filter and the sync filter set anywhere from 1 to 4. What else do I need to do? Any other info needed let me know.

At what focal length is your render camera set to?  Anything set to <50mm will give you a sharper image due to the lens angle capturing more surface area of the dome.  Using telephoto settings, narrows that field significantly, giving you pixelation and what appears to be lower image resolution from the resulting magification.  Hi res images help but the amount of viewing area must be considered if you want everything in the distance relatively sharp.  Problem with wide angles, they do distort the models if they are close to the camera.

It is normal, it depend of the size of the picture and the focal of the camera.

Try a focal around 15-25 and use a picture larger than 2048x1024, generaly i use, when i found, picture around 8000x4000

Thank you. In real photography, you would tend to use longer focal lengths outdoors. This is somewhat counterintuitive.

Quote - Thank you. In real photography, you would tend to use longer focal lengths outdoors. This is somewhat counterintuitive.

If you are doing landscape photography you would be using more of a wide angle lens.
I think many HDRI images are taken at around 35mm or shorter.

When using a HDRI file in Poser, you want to have a look at the HDRI Meta data.
The file may include information about the focal lenth used when the images were taken.
With commercial HDRI packages you may find this information in the readme file.
 

I asked about this a few weeks back, and BB pointed me to this topic...

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=3621228&ebot_calc_page#message_3621228

Personally, I've had this problem at all focal lengths, depending on the scene and what I want to show of the background.  I don't tend to use a background sphere for this reason exactly.   I'll use a plane or a cube I can resize without a problem to fit my specific image, and just use IBL and reflection maps (combined with real reflections) instead. For me, I tailor my camera angle to fit my scene, not my background, and I've had problems at really low angles just because the visible portion of the sphere still wasn't very large and the final render was 2000+ px.  Considering most monitors now support 1080p HD, that's not very high res at all.  I'm thinking of switching to 3000+ now, and am even more likely to encounter the problem in the future.

Which is not to say spheres don't work, because they obviously work for many people in many situations.  I just haven't made images using those situations yet.  Conversely, RobynsVeil pretty much always uses BB's EnvSphere in everything she does, and quite successfully.  And always renders at higher than 2000px.  But she does outdoor scenes with lots of expansive views, and I don't.  So I think it really depends on your work.

Look at my avatar.  That render used BB's EnvSphere with a background image created by glaseye (sharecg.com).  He created a variety of hires dome images which work very, very well in clarity and resolution.  That render's camera focal length was set to 35mm.

Thanks all. This helps greatly.