> The problem being that doing equivalent scenes in POV-Ray (particularly 
> interior scenes) is, from a practical point of view, impossible. Light 
> sources in POV-Ray are much too primitive for that, there's no support for 
> true area lights or good-looking blurred reflections and while there are 
> situations where it's more or less possible to simulate this (using 
> various tricks), in most cases it just doesn't work. Jaime is probably the 
> POV-Ray artist who has done the most research in that, and his best 
> results, impressive as they are from a POV-Ray perspective, are just not 
> in same league and are plagued with radiosity artifacts and area light 
> graininess.
> http://www.ignorancia.org/en/index.php?page=Modern_interior
>
> Even with the grain, the quality of the illumination in unbiaised 
> renderers is unparalleled, simply because there's no cheating involved.

I agree that there are "ease of use" issues with POV.  The work-
flow of getting the right radiosity settings, and media settings is
not very robust. Small changes can make big differences in render
time and quality.

Some "newer" features are missing from POV, SSS, blurred reflections.

Overall, many images I have seen from POV are somewhat sharp-
edged, sort of 3D cartoony.  However the best images are almost
photo-realistic, I didn't get that impression from the Indigo gallery,
the only one I remember being that way is the whisky glass.

Being able to get fast previews in Indigo, or change lighting after
the fact like Maxwell obviously is good.

It might be an OK trade-off to get a little bit grainier pictures
in exchange for spending less time messing with technical settings.

The last time I looked at Blender it had a very bad UI, maybe I should
download a newer version and see if it has changed.

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