3DS-Max and Lightwave got left out. Those and all the above will do the job. Blender is free and does a great job, but the interface is only ok. If you have an interest ingetting into games, Max is still the most used app there. Maya is the choice of all the big studios (that are using a basicly off the shelf software). Softimage got bought up by Autodesk and they seem unsure if they want to keep selling it of push the customer base towards their other software. Lightwave was by far the number one software in TV fx and was used in a lot of animation. They lost a huge amount of that market when they decided to rewrite every thing from the ground up and had nothing new for several years. They are working very hard at getting back up with new versions now and it's still in use and works well in a lot of small studios. The others get a fair amount of use all over the place.

 

Most will give you a free trial. Other then what will get you a job, the big thing is the user interface and price, of course. Check them out. A good way is to get the software and run through several tutorals by different people on each software. Not only do you get to check out the interfaces, you get to learn some animation stuff (a lot is some what transfurable from program to program)