I am certain that Firefly is not the best render engine out there.

But, in my opinion, it's not that bad.

I've got some pretty decent results from it. I consider myself to be quite a beginner, but I find that, with practice, my renders get better and better. I'm shooting for "photorealism" (whatever that is), I'm still a long way off, but as I learn more, I get closer. Some other artists (Carodan springs to mind) are already pretty much there, although they use Firefly.

Nevertheless, I would welcome some alternatives. Indeed, I achieved some stunning results using Luxrender and Pose2Lux, it's just that the render time is a bit of a killer (especially with my only interest in Poser being animation).

I've tried MentalRay in Max, it produces good results out of the box, but I find it a lot more difficult to tweak materials than in Poser's Material Room.