Janome and Brother do have a fairly good reputation, but everyone has their own preferences on machines. You don't say what your budget is, but definitely I would go to a dealer or two and see what they have for a trade in or even a new one. Lots of times they will have a high end machine that was traded in for a higher end machine and it's all been gone through and serviced and most the time, you'll get some free lessons on learning the machine. Test drive some machines that have the things that you would like.