Quote - Shade is an all-in-one 3D app, just like Carrara. Its UI is a bit quirky and does not offer the 'level of comfort' that Carrara does. Its modeler is certainly better than Carrara and I would rate it a notch above Hexagon. Its texturing system is very easy to learn and use. But what sets Shade apart is its absolutely breathtaking jaw-dropping super-fast renderer which surpasses anything that I have seen, including Lightwave, Modo, C4D, Maya and alike. You can see an example of Shade's renderer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=D0HyVyd0Thw

Faster than Modo?  I had always heard Modo was the king of the biased render engines for speed, very interesting to hear that Shade surpasses it.  Also a very cool vid, the clock looked very real.  Hmmm, maybe I should look more into Shade.  The site I pulled up had like a $750 pricetag, which is out of my realm for sure, but I see that if I go all the way to the actual purchase page it's showing Shade 14 pro for $499.  That's still out of my range, but closer.  I did shell out $400 to buy TheaRender, but that was the most expensive purchase I've made so far in pursuit of this crazy hobby.  I agree that the discounted pricetag is much closer to the un-discounted pricetag of Carrara 8.5 pro, but it's still far higher than what customers actually pay for Carrara by far, since there are ways to get it at much steeper discount than the sticker price.You mentioned Shade plays well with content too, right?  Is that specific to Poser content or can Genesis be used in Shade as well?  I do also absolutely agree that if DAZ poured some dev muscle into making Carrara's renderer faster to a level that would be comparable to what you've described in Shade that customers would definitely come flooding to Carrara.