I own Lightwave 7 and Carrara and even though Carrara is lacking certain features (such as fresnel effects and utilities for dealing with large scenes with lots of objects) I think Carrara tends to generate more beautiful results out-of-the-box. Lightwave's particle system is amazing, though. I'm running v1.1 on the PC and unfortunately I do tend to get a lot of rendering errors (and when that happens the scene I'm working on is basically kaput). This seems to happen more often if I'm using some of the nifty plug-ins like Anything Glows/Grooves. I've also needed to repeatedly discard my .ini file in order to keep going (but then I have to reload all my shaders into the browser). Lightwave isn't totally stable, either, but Carrara definitely crashes more often. If nothing else, Carrara is a friendly and fun way to learn the ins and outs of 3D (and the spline modeler is pretty cool). Lightwave is clearly very powerful but often leaves me dazed and confused! Maybe Carrara version 2 will add some helpful features like caustics, true volumetric lighting, and the ability to do things based on the incidence angle to the camera (for fresnel effects, etc). The program that has impressed me most is Maxon's Cinema 4DXL7. The BodyPaint add-on blows my mind (although I gather that RayDream had a 3d paint feature). If you can find someone with the Carrara v1.0 cd you can get some cool physical dynamics stuff happening as well (if you apply the v1.1 upgrade to v1.0 the physics features remain).