You can get pretty good results with Sas even for closeups. The problem with Saslite is that you can only set the density to a max of 300. The full version allows higher density settings. You can get around this by applying multiple instances of Saslite to your object and changing the parameters slightly from instance to instance.
If you want to modeled grass I would highly recommend Pawel Olas's Grass Generator, which you can find
here.
Hope this helps.
-ub52