jchimim: I agree that P5 seems to offer much compared to P4, but don't forget that AT THE TIME P4 came out, it was a major breakthrough also: realistic characters and posing, easy animation with walk designer, transparency for hair etc. I think that Poser 5 is not much superior for today compared to what Poser 4 used to be in early 1999. three years are forever in the computer world, and in spite of everything, P4 is STILL the powering engine behind it all, so this is the remaining proof that it was a breaktthrough for the time, indeed. And it was priced $300 or less. So that's for me the "line of tradition" for Poser. I would have understood a price variation up to $400 - but $500, sorry, but it's too much of a price increase for me to be able to follow the line of tradition there. beryld: yes I know that Propack was bad in Canada too, although I compared prices at the time and Canada was still better than EU. Let's hope in better times for everyone. Maveris: I have raised the issue more than one time. I personally tried several times to upgrade to Propack and always failed because I could never raise the necessary funds. I was even offered a "dubious" copy from a person here, which I refused because I adverse piracy strongly (I work for a CG company and I know what it means not to get work because pirates are hitting sales). Yet I have to say that as much as I find immoral the piracy, I also find immoral that for whatever the reasons, a product that somewhere in the world is available to people at a given price, somewhere else people has to pay the 70% more to get it. These were the figures I calculated about the propack in Europe. Worse was Italy, because the Italian distributor is a totally greedy company with a well deserved reputation of a greedy company. In Italy ProPack was something more than 70%+ the US price. This includes the 20% VAT, but still, it is a BIG lot more. I have calculated that it would have costed me much LESS if I could order Propack in the USA and get it via airmail priority!!! Now think how much less distributors pay for the raw product, then how much less they pay for the shipping of a large stock compared to a single item airmail priority shipping... and you get the idea of how MUCH monstruous greed is hiding somewhere in the line that brings CL products from the US to Europe. Second to Italy with regards to bad pricing, there was England, which was just a little better. France was better, it was still very high there too, but the figure was about 40% or 50% more than US price, which is a lot, but if you compare it to the over 70% increase of Italy... At the time, I mentioned the situation to the CL staff, but I got no feedback from them - but this is not important, the important thing is that they DO SOMETHING to DRAMATICALLY cut the price recharge factor of foreign redistributors. Poser is a hot seller, is not an obscure software. It's selling figures could justify, in my opinion, that Curious Labs applies a non-exclusive policy to resellers. I am under the impression (I might be bad, but still have to be contradicted about this) that CL, in order to raise some pre-sale money, signed some sort of distribution exclusivity contracts with European resellers, getting some financial return in change of the freedom for the reseller to set the price in a non competitive way (buying Propack online from a foreing country was severely forbidden). Now all evidences lead to this conclusion and I am not afraid in stating out now that this is not a good policy with regards to customers. It creates heavy discriminations, leaves the software destiny in the hands of virtually greedy (and practically also!) people (the exclusive resellers), and raises anger in the foreing users who like me, feel discriminated and injustly punished. Now I think that if a company is worried about piracy, this is the road they should NOT take. For one like me who is strong enough (and personally interested enough, I admit) in fighting piracy, you'll meet dozens who might be perplexed about hitting a friendly company with a warez use, but woh would not hesitate in hitting an unfriendly and discriminating company if they had an occasion. And you all know that an increase in piracy will lead to less resources invested in developement of future versions, and a damage to us all ultimately over the years. And the FIRST to tace care of taking measures againts this MUST be the software producer: CL MUST do everything that is possible to ensure that Poser 5 is honestly and fairly distributed all over the world, wihtout resellers vampirizing the final customers at their will. This means, dear CL (if you are reading this), that you must say STOP and NO to exclusivity contracts for third party resellers, if you want to keep the love and respect from your foreign users.