Rating: 
Summary: the complaints are true - but at this price, buy it!
Review: Poser 5 is buggy, the company making it may be on its death bed - but at this price, it is well worth buying.
Why? Because of all the features that DO work - and especially because of the TON of free and inexpensive characters and clothing and animals and buildings that exist for Poser.Renderosity.com is a good starting place to hear no-holds-barred discussion of the pros and cons. And crazy programmers (including me), not affiliated with Curious Labs, keep writing add-on utilities to extend Poser, or to work around its limitations. Come join this vibrant community!
I personally promise you will be glad you did!
-- ToolmakerSteve
Rating: 
Summary: make sure you know what you buy!
Review: Curious Labs does not allow resale of this software, so make sure you know what you buy. They shut down auctions on Ebay.
Rating:
Summary: don't bother
Review: it doesn't live up to its promised capabilities. still has bugs. rendering animations is a problem. initial purchasers helped get many bugs fixed thru beta testing forum. some promised features are still all but usless(face room). some of the pro pack export functions to other programs are now non-existant. no new fixes to allow it to take advantage of newer computer capabilities (open gl etc). still a good prog for making stills only but i had poser n pro pack for that. sorry i bought it at the moment, waiting to see if another service pack comes out.
hoping that the daz studio program turns out to be better.
Rating:
Summary: People maker Poser
Review: Poser 5 really is better than version 4. There are new features such as cloth, face and hair editing windows. You can now import photographs straight into the program to apply to faces. The only problem with moving up to version 5 is that everything you had downloaded into your older version does not move into the five program and in fact this is not a seamless upgrade, you will have a Poser 4 and 5 on your computer after the install, this is the major reason I give it a 4 stars as opposed to a 5. However if I were rating the rendering time of this program alone, I would give it a 5 Stars. Poser renders super fast at 1200 res as opposed to Bryce which takes all day to do the same. If you want a character model that you don't have to build from scratch this is what you need. You can save your models as different files to import them into other programs. If you need a quick and easy person in your landscapes this is a nice way to get it. I still haven't figured out all of the functions of this program, the textures and materials applications that really manipulate the standard models they provide, but I look forward to learning more when I find the time. Works fine with XP operating system.
Rating:
Summary: Professional power - great content library...
Review: We do a lot of Poser work for clients, and have been with the program for several versions. We also use 3DS Max and Lightwave in our production work. While Poser5 does have a few bugs they simply haven't been an impediment to our production level use of the tool - and the increased productivity of the new features has more than justified the upgrade. Poser5 has proved to be invaluable in our work with human models, the program is good at it and the third party merchants have created an astonishing wealth of objects, textures, clothing and so on for use with it. It is typical to save hundred of hours over creating the same models from scratch in 3DS Max or Lightwave.
Rating: 
Summary: This is not a bargain, but all it is worth
Review: With that title, you would expect me to say I hate Poser 5, I don't. I love it. Parts of it. I have a very very beefy machine and I expect 5 to crash at least once a day, with the patches. Here is my advice, if you are not an animator-- animation has too many problems to even consider justifying a purchase-- and you have a processor over 1Gig and memory over 512RAM, preferably 1 Gig, then you problems with Poser 5 will be minimal and about what one would expect from Poser 4. The Poser line is noted for bugs and crashes, but many 3d programs costing much more are. Have patience, working, posing, moving between libraries, and especially rendering is slow, quite slow. It is good quality, which is why I actually like Poser 5, the new renderer has raytracing, depth cuing, remarkable detail and depth that Poser has never had before. However, even with a beefy computer, you will find it difficult to render large scenes, or even scenes with more than 2 people and props. Don't bother looking for good books to teach you Poser 5, there are none. Good Luck.
Rating: 
Summary: Worst Programming I've Ever Seen
Review: To anyone interested in this type of program, the best advice I can give is stay away from Poser 5. Get Poser 4 and the Pro Pack instead. Reason? Poser 5 *is* Poser 4 ... with some bad, sloppy programming thrown on top (known as "new features.") The package is built on the original code from the 1999 Poser 4. Even the old bugs are still there. But without the "new features," Poser 4 is much more stable, can run on lower-end machines, and is ten times faster in everything it does. The new features in Poser 5 I mention are the Hair, Cloth, and Material Rooms, each room allowing you to design your own hair, etc. They sound very nice but the problem is they don't often work. They crash even the best high-end computers, they even lock up the program when clicking from one room to another. And even when they *do* work, they are so slooooow they are virtually useless. And if you're new to Poser, you're at least a year away from doing any of this yourself anyway. There is plenty of free hair and clothes available on the net for Poser 4. The Poser 5 patches have been mentioned. Yes, they appear to have fixed *some* stability problems, but not nearly all or even most. Even if Egisys eventually does fix all the stability issues, the clutziness and slowness of the program will always be there. This is because the core code dates back to 1999...a dinosaur in the computer world. It's not written to take advantage of *any* hardware improvements since that year. (Again, Poser 4 is faster because it doesn't have the added weight of the buggy, sloppily-coded, "new features.") Again, my advice: Stick with Poser 4 and its Pro Pack (if you need it) and wait for Poser 6...
Rating:
Summary: Good, but still not the best
Review: Basically, Poser is still not as good as "professional" 3-D programs. Its system requirements are higher than Lightwave or 3-D Studio Max. It (still) does not use OpenGL or hardware-acceleration for rendering or previewing models. Even though the system requirements state that it can be used under Windows 98, do not even try it- Windows 98's memory management can't even handle Poser 4's renders. The "advanced features" (Hair Room, Cloth Dynamics, Face Room) seem to be corrected in the latest service pack. However, unlike Poser Pro Pack, Paser 5 has *no* support for exporting scenes to 3-D Studio Max, Bryce, Vue, or Lightwave. The new "materials room" is more powerful, but much more complicated to use. The "Firefly" render engine gives mixed results- for some people, the texture maps aren't as sharp. For other, the renders are nice and crisp. If you purchase this program, be absolutely sure you keep up with the updates and Service Packs. [...]
Rating:
Summary: buggy, and no customer support
Review: While I think it has great potential, it seems to have a few bugs that potentially stop it from being useable. I gave this as a gift, and the owner has had his hard drive crash (including a new one he installed after the first crash). I should note both hard drives crashed after the installation of Poser 5 and the upgrade on their website.
I have emailed Curious Labs several times for customer support (as has the gift recipient), but have recieved absolutely NO response. Three weeks is a more than adequate time to wait for a response. There is also no technical support phoneline, which there should be.
My main problem with this company is not the product at this point, but the lack of service (or even acknowledgement of customers) on behalf of Curious Labs. I am curious to know if anyone has ever recieved any sort of follow up by this company. I won't be buying any future products from this company.
Rating: 
Summary: High Recommendation
Review: In my experience, Poser 5 is the best main-stream design and animation program out there. I don't want the over-simplistic products available on a mass consumer level, but don't really need the over featured professional offerings that cost $$$$ either. I bought Poser 5 about 2 weeks ago was able to get started immediately on an entirely new software tool and came away with a customer ready layout on my first day of use. Within a week of trying it out (maybe about 10 hours total), I am actively using the powerful and more advanced features and I can not begin to explain how incredible my finished designs have been. Don't take my word for it, check out what art was created in a contest Curious recently held specifically for Poser 5 use. Stumbled across these examples when I went to their site to download the patch. I've been very skeptical about my decision to purchase Poser, I've heard many mixed messages of people loving it or hating it. I recently decided to take the chance with Poser 5 (buying it from Amazon of course). This isn't part of the product review - but because I almost let the poor user reviews I've read stop me from getting one the best tools I've had in a LONG time, hopefully I can help to encourage others. Any of us using software in the past 15 years has had a number of different experiences of frustration from initial bugs shipping in a new release. Some from very large manufacturers or from really wonderful product all in all and some even with data loss issue's. It sounds like there were some bugs within the initial launch of Poser 5 that caused the negative feedback. But in downloading and using the Service Release 2.1 (from Curious Labs site) with my initial Poser 5 installation, I am happy to say I missed experiencing that whole problem. Believe me, I took the time to test out features and the reported bugs (previous to the patch) on a system set up with very similar spec's to those reporting bugs and have not experienced one. I also am no novice user, and not new to the 3D world. I trust in my ability to say I'm using Poser 5 on a high level capacity. Of course, no software is perfect - no software at all. And I'm sure many will find those "I wish it had" features missing, but for a product that does not cost me even close to a professional high-end application, yet with capabilities that takes me into the professional creation level, I could NOT recommend this product to anyone more!!!!
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