Once again, the debate over photorealism and renders.

If I really, really must have photorealism, for the price of a couple of quality outfits, I can hire a model for a couple of hours, and my Nikon and the model, with her non-transmapped hair, extremely good skin shaders, fully dynamic clothing, and complete soft-body physics, are guaranteed to be photorealistic.

As for render times, I can't speak to Luxrender, but rarely do my print resolution IDL renders take much longer than an hour. I think people are using insane render settings that are totally unnecessary for the pixel quality they need -- or they're trying desperately to eradicate light emitter artifacts with higher and higher settings instead of just using a point light.

True, Poser has serious weaknesses in its renderer, just as most of us have serious weaknesses in our 3d software budgets. But with a bit of experimentation it yields decent results. For anything better, you need to spend considerable time working on the hair and soft-body issues before you even need to think about lighting and renderers. And if you've got a stiff, unrealistic pose, the greatest renderer in the world won't save the image.

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PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.