Ah--this is a slippery slope--you will soon become obsessed. Your cheapest option is one of the small stand-alone machines by Brother or Simplicity. They run from $500-700. You then have to buy some sort of converter box to download designs and transfer them to the machine which I believe runs about $150. The largest area they will embroider is 4" x 4", so if you want to do something bigger, you need software to "split" the design and do it in stages. There are one or two stand-alones which do bigger fields (Janome and Bernina, I believe), but the vast majority of machines are sewing/embroidery combo machines and the sky's the limit in terms of price with these. In my opinion, the best three brands to look for are Viking, Pfaff, and Babylock, and you can find used ones in decent condition at sewing machine dealers (you can also find them on Ebay, but they will likely be more expensive and there's no guarantee what condition they'll be in). My advice would be to figure out what SM dealers are in your area, decide who is the friendliest, and see what used machines they have to offer--they will likely guarantee the work for a decent amount of time. Good luck!