I wasn't sure if the new Poser would be worth the money, but I decided to chance it. Now that I've had a chance to play with it a bit, I am very glad that I did.

I was mainly hoping that Poser 8 would load faster and that its OpenGL implementation would work better with my video card. I'm happy to say that both are true. It loads faster, runs smoother, performs better and is more stable than Poser 7, at least on my system. I know some people have reported frequent crashes, but so far my experience has been crash-free.

Part of the reason I stopped doing art as much as I used to was that Poser 7 just never worked very well on my computer. It became a real deterrent, since every time I opened Poser 7 it felt like a struggle. Well, from what I've seen so far the pain is gone and the fun is back.

And that's not to mention the new user interface! The UI changes were much needed, and really enhance the product. It still has the same controls I'm used to, so Poser users will have basically no learning curve with the new UI. But everything docks in a way that makes sense, there is a larger view window into the scene you're working on, and the content library UI has been completely reworked. That's right, no more clunky cumbersome library controls taking up too much space. That alone is worth the price of admission in my book.

The only negative I can report at all is that I had problems with the installer (see my last journal entry). But even that has a happy ending. Smith Micro tech support responded in less than an hour (!) and solved the problem. I never would have expected that from e-frontier.

So all in all I'm a happy camper. I am very, very glad I made the upgrade. Your mileage may vary of course, but based on my experience I highly recommend it to any user of Poser.