Attached Link: http://www.angelfire.com/art2/cheapskate/

Ther's lots of copies of Computer Arts with free Poser3 on the shelves in England and if you use a Macintosh Macformat is giving it away too. I've just started using it and I love it. The main differences as far as I can see are; 1) More lights in P4 but P3 lights are adequate. 2) You get magnets which allow you to morph figures and clothing in P4 3) You can render more realistic hair and eyelashes etc. plus modify clothing using transparency maps in P4, you'll have to deal with this kind of thing with a graphics app like photoshop if you use P3. 4) You get clothing, better figures and more animals with P4. There is clothing for P3 figures available for download and with some dowloaded morphs the P3 figures are pretty good! 5) Clothing can be made to conform to figures in P4. Someone else can explain it better than me but as BAM said it makes things quicker/easier.

With some effort and a bit of postwork you can get great results with P3

If you want to see what can be done with poser3 you can check my humble offering on my artists page or better yet look at the work at EnglishBob's site. (see link)

Baz