Oranda,
Speaking as a relative newcomer to Poser - I've been fiddling with it for about 8 months - I can give advice from recent experiance.

Definately download the trial version of poser and play with it a bit. IMPORTANT TIP: pose your character with the dials; don't try to do it by the mouse. You get much better results with the dials.

Some type of software to do postwork is a must if you want to get the kinds of results you see in the gallery. Figures need touchups, special effects are added mostly through postwork, etc. Poser's rendering engine is only so-so at best so postwork is a must for best effect. Adobe Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro are the most common postwork tools, and neither are cheap. I was lucky to already own photoshop before I bought Poser.

I'm going to politely disagree with bjbrown and suggest you hold off on buying Micheal and Victoria. The two of them together cost almost as much as poser does! They are very nice figures, but play around with the standard figures first. I finally did pick up Victoria but frankly don't work with her much. Also, DAZ periodically puts them on sale so you can get them cheaper than full retail.

There ARE some extra softwares in our Marketplace that allow for generation of sceenery and terrain. Litluver makes absolutely to die for trees at a good price - and this is a botanist praising his stuff, and I'm VERY picky about plants. George Deep has a terrain set and there's another called "Core Worlds".

There are also tons of freebies out there. Besides our own Free Stuff section visit some of the members of the Webring. Kozeburo's Digital Babes (3rd site down on the frontpage web ring listing) has the most incredible and realistic free hair in a variety of styles. The default poser hairs are hopeless.

Also visit Traveler's MorphWorld. Traveler has a huge variety of 'morphs', some of which correct some of the Poser default figure's most glaring errors, others which enhance modeling of the face and body of "Posette" (the default p4 female) and the "Dork" (the default P4 male, so named for his dorky eye configuration). Some of his stuff is free, and he has a CD collection for sale of hundreds of morphs that is worth every penny of the cost.

Most importantly you've found one of the largest and most active 3D communities there are. People here are always ready to help, and we have some incredibly talented modellers here that are always ready to give advice; also some of the people from curious labs and DAZ hang around here and often will help with technical questions.

Best of luck and HAVE FUN!