I'm also interested in a EM but I have no experience with them and even less knowledge. Most of the machines I see look like sewing machines with a larger work area, so how do you do multiple color designs unless you buy a machine that holds 6 different color threads? I understand about the different manufacturers using their own programing languages, are there machines that read most of them or can you buy a program the translates the different languages into useful languages for your machine? I'll stop with my questions for now but I reserve the right to ask more. ;-)