zechs: * The new Daz product will probably be in the $500-$600 range. (a guess but an educated one.) * Probably not such an educated guess. DAZ's primary intention for starting development of this product back in January was as insurance against the prospects of CL going down the tubes (or blowing P5). They still consider 3D modelling to be their primary business (and by all accounts it seems to be a profitable one), and so, for them, 'Studio' is primarily a way of ensuring a future for their 'content' products. Now part of their intention may also be to avoid a need to move their product line down the proprietry path of CL's P5 technologies, which would also leave DAZ's future in the hands of CL. As such they can treat it as a loss leader, with their pricing strategy aimed at getting it into as many peoples hands as possible as an alternative to Poser. Obviously, despite anything that may be stated, it will be sold in direct competition with Poser and the pricing will reflect this, with competitive upgrades most likely aimed at undercutting (perhaps substantially) Poser's upgrade pricing. As for the release date, as stated no one knows, but likely they would have been looking for a 12 month development period for a product of this sort, so I would expect that would be aiming for beta testing around the start of the new year. We do know that they were integrating code at about the time of the P5 release, and that they have just started development of the rendering code (which should be fairly straightforward - someone should tell CL). However, all indications of the products features must be promising, not least as they have the benefit of having witnessed CL mistakes. Additionally, the developers seemed, in some earlier discussions on this forum, to have had a fairly clear and solid idea of what they want to achieve, in contrast to CL lead developers, who, many times demonstrated a disturbing lack of knowledge about the technology that was to be implemented in P5. Nobody should expect "Studio" to be perfect, its already been stated that plugin support will be lacking initially, which for me seems to indicate an weakness in its architecture (you are either modular or you aren't), but, on the other hand P5 is likely a technological dead end. If you want to be able to continue with any projects, stick with P4/ProPack until you have a better idea of which path to follow. Think of VHS/Betamax here and remember that Betamax was generally recognised as the better techology, although VHS had the better 'content'. In this case DAZ may well be the winner on both counts. I suspect that there will probably be some additional information from DAZ on pricing or schedule released before the end of the year. Bill