Fretslayer

Actually, I see a big difference between Poser 4 and newest version of DazStudio but I admit openly I am more of a Daz user than a Poser user. I have P4, P7, P8 and PPro but I don't use them often. Actually I gave away my P4 several years ago. Also I have the Poser plugin for Max but it's really weird to get used to for me. I know that Poser Pro is part of it (and why I have it) Poser Fusion I think it's called. It (in theory) allows you to set up the scene in PPro and then export/import to Max were you can render the scene there. I thought about doing this for the project that Taranis and I have going (Star Trek: The Armageddon Clock) but the extra work in the pipeline made it not a possibility at the moment.

One thing I do know is that it seems that Poser (at least the newer versions) handle DISP mapping better than Daz Studio but D|S is free.

And yep, the render engine is much faster and if you tweak D|S well enough, the renders IMO are better looking than even the newest version of Poser.

Also there are a lot of new cool lighting addons for D|S and while I don't know if they work in Poser, I know the AniBlocks used in both D|S and Carrara are pretty awesome.