I bought a Babylock Emore before it was discontinued, and have been happy with it. BUT if I were to do it again, I would possibly go with the Janome 350E - partly because you can use a flash drive to transfer designs to it - makes it a lot simpler. I use Embird, and I find that it does everything I need to customize my embroidery designs, and it's reasonably priced. I have no desire to do any digitizing, but their digitizing software is reasonably priced too. Good luck!