Mumbo

Lightwave is quite cheap... £1059, as for XSI go here cos I cannot work it out... but you an get an experience CD for $4.99 bit like Maya PLE. There seems to be two flavours of Softimage the XSI which starts at arounfd £6,000 and goes upwards and then there is the older version SoftImage 3D which is cheaper and was used alot by Framestore to do 'Walking with Dinosaurs' and 'Walking with Beasts'.

Hope that helps!