Blender is coming out of the stone age!

Developers are working on integrating a new render called "Cycles" into blender, to replace or coexist alongside the BI (or Blender Internal).

Cycles is an amazing render engine, because it is unbiased.
This means that the render is closer to real life lighting.
When using BI, I had to look up lighting tutorials often, especially as a beginner.
When I use cycles, I don't have to look up lighting tutorials, I look up youtube videos of studio lighting and photography lessons. This is because Cycles bounces light in a much more realistic way.
When using BI, if you have only one light source, and you have an object next to it, one side of the object will be lit, and the other side will be completely dark. This is not how light works in the real world. In reality, light bounces off any surface it hits, which means rarely is any surface truly unlit. BI used to "fake" this by using techniques such as Global Illumination, and Ambient Occlusion. Unfortuneately they were time consuming and finnicky at best. Cycles does all of this and more automagically, all of the default settings are fine for the majority of renders.

Cycles is not ready for prime-time yet, but if you want to have a play around with it, head over to graphicall.org, and grab a recent build of blender, whatever is appropriate for your computer(ie, don't get a 64bit version if your computer only supports 32bit).
Then just start the new build of blender, and click on "Blender Internal" at the top of the window, and choose Cycles instead.

Quick tip 1: Cycles does not support light sources coming from a single point, to create a light to use in cycles, add a new plane mesh, and in the materials tab, change its type to "Emission" and have a play around with the variables. For some extra fun, change the viewport shading to rendered, and the 3d viewport will update in realtime. While this can be disconcerting at first, I can see it becoming an invaluable tool in the future.

Quick tip 2: If you have a fast gpu, click on the render tab in the properties side bar, and change the render device from cpu to gpu and compare the render time. If you have an older video card, you may get errors in rendering, or just a black image. If so just change it back to cpu.

Have fun!

Ps:
If you want a more in-depth tutorial on using cycles, then I recommend Andrew Price's tutorial, at blender guru. Have a look at it here.