Hi, I've just had a thought, I bought something recently from the USA (hardware) that cost around $179 (including shipping) and had it delivered to Germany. The tax on that was less than 30 Euro's (another $30) so even if I have to pay aditional shipping charges, I reckon that getting a copy shipped from the states and paying local takes is going to be cheaper than paying for a retail upgrade in Europe. Food for thought... later jb

You're doing this is stereo? :o] :] FishNose

Perhaps a case of Alzheimer Light? ;o)

Hehe... a friend of mine was telling me the other day, that an old lady she knows met her at the bus stop and said, 'Do you know, I got this disease, the doctor told me, it's called, alz, um, alz,..... alz something....." :o] For real! :] FishNose

heh that would make a cute joke in swedish, jag kommer inte alls ih... [sorry it's probably misspelled, I'm not THAT good at swedish...]

I thought I'd read this one before, just put it down to going senile tho :) Rob

ernyoka, jag er inte svensk, jag er bare sjuk....

maybe he needs two licenses...

Praxis22: I also made the calculation that to buy and ship ProPack from the US was cheaper than to buy it from European reseller. Problem is, that is was impossible to buy from the US because of the exclusivity license the European resellers used to have for ProPack. Let's hope that this does not repeat for Poser 5. Else we would be in the hands of merciless distributors. I hope Curious Labs will listen to European users. They ahve already proved they want to meet the users' needs with the very affordable upgrade prices to P5. So I hope that they will complete the work and not forget about us. To have the choice, to either buy from the EU distributor or online from the US companies (like the CL store itself, or Beyond.com, Amazon, etc.), would be already great. Such choice would mean competition and therefore smaller prices for the final EU customers. Let's hope so. - Orio

Trekkie, that was a good one!!!! ROFL! Jag kommer inte alz ih...... :o] :] FishNose

Remember that one of the reasons for high European retail prices is the added VAT, which is considerably higher than in the US. Custom duties also applies on US software sold here. None of this money ends up in the pockets of Curious Labs or their European distributors, so they can't do much about it. Don't tell any custom officials, but I just might try to circumvent this by having it mailed to a US friend, who will then send it to me as a private package... ;-) Ernyoka, your Swedish spelling was excellent :-)

I'm sorry Kelderek, but if the higher European prices had anything to do with VAT or shipping costs nobody would complain. I've ordered several pieces of software directly from the US, so I pretty much know what to expect from VAT/custom duties/shipping costs. (And I guess I'm not the only one) Those costs cannot begin to explain why we have to pay TWICE the price for P4. With egisys being located in Germany I hope matters will improve for Poser5.

Clarification: you can either have custom charges or VAT. Normally, they are about the same figures. FOr instance, in Italy you have 20% for custom charges and the same for VAT. You can not pay both. If you buy abroad, you pay custom charges and the shipping which is usually expensive. If you buy from the local reseller, you pay VAT, shipping (much less usually than from abroad) AND the reseller share. It is easy to understand that the reason why it is usually cheaper to buy from abroad than from a local reseller is because local resellers often apply vampirizing recharge of price on the products they distribute. This is also why many resellers try to cover their backs with exclusivity contracts. Especially when it comes to software, they know that people buys a lot form the Internet nowadays, and if they want to keep speculating on the products prices, they need exclusivity, else people would buy abroad from Amazon etc. Exclusivity is the reason why Poser 4 and ProPack almost costed double on most EU countries. As you said, let's hope that things change with Poser 5.

Here in Sweden they will gladly apply both custom charges and VAT to goods you buy from the US... VAT applies to all goods you import and that is above a certain value (price paid to the US company applies). The custom charges are added as well and (this really bugs me) they add the VAT to the price paid + custom charges... That means that we pay VAT on the custom charges as well!! sigh

Those Swede's sure love their tax!

Shipping was $40, and the box is probably the same size and weight as P5 will be. I effectively paid $70 on top of the $135 that the item cost. I simply couldn't buy it elsewhere. A hardware card for doing accelerated realtime playback and enhancement of DivX:-) movies. Plays back full screen, in PAL/NTSC, even does S-VHS and HDTV, comes with a remote and an EU "Scart/Peritel" cable to connect direct to the TV/Video :) Saw it on Tom's hardware and was consumed with "Techno lust" :P So, if P5 costs $179 as an upgrade that's what I'm paying for it, (plus shipping and taxes :) Otherwise I have these sage words from Curious labs to fall back on: "INTERNATIONAL PRICING MAY VARY" later jb

Attached Link: http://www.xe.net/ucc

OK, I have no idea why there are two of them, "it wasn't me!" Honest! :) But having had a chance to surf the now updated price at Curious labs store it pans out like this: We're already getting stiffed! To the tune of some 36% or more. The P4/pro pack (full) bundle is $279 (181, 286 Euros, according to xe.net) at the curious labs store, but the same store lists the same product as 285 or 390 Euros respectively. Now I figure that if shiping cost $40 and you get charged 50 Euros import duty (On the high side I think) then that pans out to 377 Euros in your hand. Cheaper than the official Euro price, before shipping... If you're living in the UK, well, lets just say that "Rip Of Britain" is taking another bite, especially if you consider that the list price of $279 is 181, while 390 Euros is 249, but the official UK price is 285, more than a 100 mark up, 50% percent more than the dollar cost. Yup, I'm buying it in the US, I don't care if I have to wait a few weeks, I'll just wait for the reviews and the freestuff to build up :) later jb