Is Corel Draw Suite X4 worth the upgrade price

[georgetroy]

The new upgrade is out for $199.00 is it really worth that much more over X3?Where is some more vector features? It looks like they did a few enhancements, some templates and more photo features.

[steve.ledger]

More useless Bloat.

I'll be avoiding it thanks.


Here's a review with ScreenShots

It seems that MS have at last opened up their .pub format. CDX4 can open Publisher files.

[EchoAlfa]

Hi George!
If I could get it for $199 I might consider it, but over here in the UK Corel want £180 for it, and my first impressions after using the trial for a couple of days is that it is just too expensive if you are a personal user. Maybe corporate users would find it worthwhile.

[georgetroy]

I'll wait and she what shakes out price wise. Amazon will be less. Corel has offered a better deal in the past. I forget what I paid for my Corel Draw X3 upgrade. Guessing ,either approx. $150 or $99. I don't use school versions and don't qualify any way. I do use Corel Trace a lot and improvements as stated for X4 would be good in that area.

[Oramue]

I just installed the trial and I would say that depends on how much of an UI stickler you are. The UI is much cleaner, the icons friendlier. Otherwise, you're paying for a few minor tweaks.

But that's how it goes down with Corel products. They typically save their good stuff for every other upgrade.

[steve.ledger]

The UI is much cleaner, the icons friendlier. Otherwise, you're paying for a few minor tweaks.

'customisation' takes care of your UI and icons in X3 (if you care about them).

CorelDraw has a built-in icon editor for all of the toolbar icons, so changing them to something you prefer is quite easy, albiet a little time consuming if you wanted to change them all.

To demonstrate this, I have replaced one CorelDrawX3 icon with one that I am more familiar with.

I agree, certainly not worth upgrading for prettier/friendlier icons..

[spidermurph]

Hi George

I am a professional user of Corel and have been for years (from V6). I design for the music and movie industry. Covers, In-store displays and websites. I am always excited when a new version comes around, eager to get my hands on the new features and productivity improvements. So I downloaded the trial of X4 from the Corel site and got stuck into the new features. That took all of ten minutes. What a disappointment, there are so few new features and what is new is of little use. Not only that, but on my systems (all XP) X4 seems to be slower than X3. Needless to say I will be in no hurry to shell out £180 for the upgrade. I think I'll wait for X5.

Murph

[Richard S]

I went from 10 to 12 but then stopped. Whats others opinion of the move from 12 to X4?
I followed Sledger's link and read the comments and someone mentioned the dxf and dwg file association. Does anyone know what version of dwg they support?
regards, Richard

[Xhris]

It's interesting how the total lack of new 'vector tools' in CDX4 is producing immensely less negative uproar than when Xara's upgrades don't introduce very many. An interesting imbalance. Perhaps it's a sign that people don't care about CD much relatively.

[steve.ledger]

An interesting imbalance. Perhaps it's a sign that people don't care about CD much relatively.

Isn't it more of a sign of TG's roots? Most of the regulars here are XaraXtreme users. I'd recon seasoned CorelDraw users would find more active CD forums.