Whoa nelly! Poser 5 is cheap! When I heard the figure 549, I thought that was expensive, (not that Poser 5 wouldn't be worth that), but now that I see the upgrade prices, they're astonishing. I would've paid $300 for the upgrade. Shhhh, don't tell Curious Labs. Ben

Please make your $300 check out to A-N-T-H-O- :-)

lol, I'm not personally wealthy, I just had a job for the last two weeks, and was prepared to pay that for Poser 5

Well, the upgrade price should be in line with normal arbitrage as done by non owners. If its cheaper to buy the program outright than it is to buy P4pro and upgrade, that's what folks will do. And vise versa. Traditionally, unless there's excess stock to ditch, a company will make the program cheaper than buying the previous version and getting the upgrade. This is what CL has done and it follows the industry method. That said, there is the issue of whether or not P5 is overprice, or underpriced. While the program does have a significant upgrade, and hopefully will vault into the big leagues, its not there yet. And, its a limited program. It poses and animates models already made. Maya, LW, Universe, Max make and animate the models. Poser has to rely on outside apps to make the models, but the animation with collision detection is superior. What this means is that Poser is appropriately priced at this stage. Its high for a limited app, and low for a plugin to anyone who chooses to cater to it. Since it doesn't have a plugin record, other than the hobbyist Vue and the entrepronearing LW, it has to pay its dues. When more high end apps include poser as a plugin, then Poser will begin its ascent from the hobby community to the pro community and so will begin the ascent of price. Ok, now here's another wrinkle in the economics... Many of the high end proggy's like Maya, Softimage, Universe, etc, want their piece of the market place in hollywood. To do that requires two things. First, people who can run the apps, second, cutting edge functionality. Maya recently cut their price from near $20k to about $5k. Why? I'll speculate that the learning curve and competition is causing colleges to teach LW and other apps leaving a shortage of Maya artists. So, by releasing the Personal Learning Edition, they can tap into the hobby community that was otherwise excluded from this, in hopes of producing more users and therefore more qualified employees for the movie companies. Notice that LW recently released a watermark edition and Softimage has a demo cd that can be ordered. Enter Poser, a previously and mostly hobby app. Poser is cutting edge with collision detection and cloth movement and hair growth, etc, and they are coming into a new economy of reduced prices and incentive to bring users into the market place. Put it all together and the price is very well chosen. THere's a lot of thought into the price from what I see and the easy way to explain it is to say that Poser is priced in the Poser tradition. I suspect Kupa hired some high end analysts to advise this obvious trend. It would be the prudent thing to do.

Nah, we just rolled three 10-sided dice :-)))

"Nah, we just rolled three 10-sided dice :-)))"

I KNEW IT!!! I knew that's how prices on programs over a hundred dollars were done, I just knew it, and he just admitted it!!! :P

If were getting insider info here, can someone explain why 549 and not 550, it doesnt fool anybody. ;)

The dice are never wrong.

Depends on where you roll them...lol Marque

I've got to say, I'm not poor, but I only do graphics as a hobby, and while Poser isn't quite as expensive as I might be willing to pay, its close to the ceiling, and even just paying for the upgrade is going to leave a noticable hole in my finances. I think Curious Labs have the right idea - price (relatively) low, hope to make more sales through doing so.

Consider that the Poser 5 upgrade price is close to double the previous price. It will be twice as hard for me to get this kind of money. At this point I'll be lucky to come up with the purchase price in a few weeks.. maybe more like months.

Legume, I was tempted to ask a question, so you could say yes, but I'll restrain myself. OOOOOO that hurt.

Routledge, I know it's silly but people psycologicly round down when you drop that penny or dollar even though they know that it is a miniscule difference. I know, I run a retail shop and see it every day. so 549 sounds closer to 500 then 550

Thanks wdupre, I was actually aware of the reasoning, I just wanted to have a hopefully humorous dig. Collecting 20 of pennies just from shop-change made me realise that I was being "taken for a ride" with the xx.99 pricing. It would be fair to say in the U.K. that the penny only exists for this reason as it is not possible to buy a single item that costs 1p. Even a penny-chew costs 5p. Retail psychology is fascinating, from the obvious use of certain specific people in ads, to the current trend of selling to empowered women by denegrating men in most TV ads. Recently at work we were made aware of a CAD package originally used for the design of Superstores, which calculated things like how to get customers into unpopular product areas by designing a flow to the popular stuff.

Things in shops cost x.99 not entirely for psychological reasons. It's really so that the shop assistant has to open the till to give you your 0.01 change, and therefore has to ring up the purchase. If the item cost $5.00, there would be a temptation for the assistant to pocket the $5 bill and put the loss of the item down to shoplifters. However, I don't think anyone is going to pay $550 in cash, so that doesn't arise here. BTW I think that was rather well put by EricofSD, and it has the ring of truth about it. It seems to me that the product is fairly priced, at least in the US.

Well....let's see....$195 upgrade price from poser4...added to $3,600 for new computer so I can run the darned thing....(currenly only have 400MHz processor.....) Scarab<-by the roadside....picking up aluminum cans....

Hey I know the feeling. I almost had the wife convinced to let me get a Dell, so I could pay $35 a month for 4 years (ouch). Then she mentioned there would be no money for any other computer stuff. Then I mentioned Poser 5, and the conversation stopped. So I'll save my pennies for Poser 5, and hope my lowly Intel Celeron 533 mhz with 512MB of RAM doesn't choke to death.

EricofSD, I mostly agree with you, but..... 'Maya, LW, Universe, Max make and animate the models. Poser has to rely on outside apps to make the models' Oh yeah? I haven't found the button in max that makes the models yet! LOL. Maybe it wasn't in max v3. I know what you're saying, but for the average hobbyist, making models like Vicki in any app would be impossible. That's why poser IS so popular. It allows people to create art without having to take a University course in making models. And there ain't nuffin' wrong with that. mac

crisjon1950, Kupa said that P5 likes a 500MHz cpu with 128MB system RAM (256MB recommended) but will run on a 450 just not as well. So it sounds like your 533mhz an' 512 ram will do quite well :-) I'm the one that's gonna cpu upgrade, I only got a 400

Scarab: $3600 for a new computer?!

Hell yeah!....this time I want something major with a at least a Gig of Ram and a 21" monitor!..... Scarab<-(doesn't want to drive his father's Oldsmobile anymore.....)

Having just flipped through this month's Maximum PC magazine, $3600 ought to buy your father's Lamborghini;-)

Yeah...but start adding things on...like bigger monitors, more ram, etc....it gets outta hand purty quickly....and if you dont, you end up being obsolete so much sooner.... Scarab<-slave to my desires....