Your image is a bit dark. When I look in the glass, I would expect the sky
to be brighter and the road darker (if it's a road) and the table more lit.
This is what HDRI is for. On the other hand I agree, this HDRI thing is a
bit overrated. Some says it's the holy grale! But higher contrasts in
image_maps, used as faked enviroment, is more realistic. With radiosity, I'm
fairly confident it gives a better result than a mere 24-bit image, because
radiosity calculations react to light intensities above 1 (a white rgb)...
But with reflections, the docs says "POV-Ray uses a limited light model that
cannot distinguish between objects which are simply brightly colored and
objects which are extremely bright" therefore we have the
reflection_exponent keyword... So that shouldn't work in favor of HDR, but
I'm not fully certain about it.

Btw, you haven't used interpolation of your image_map, have you?

Regards,
Hugo

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