The difference between the two machines is that Elissimo does hi end embroidery and has more available to do transfers to machine. Symphony is a sew/quilting machine and a very good choice if you dont want embroidery functions and be able to use flash drives. Good choice in order to keep budget friendly!

The price for my Cresendo was $3,600 which included the 3 year gold warranty. Before tax -after , for like 4,000. It is not an embroidery combo machine.

I have the baby lock Ellisimo, have had it about 2-1/2 years use it a lot and love it, have done a lot of designs on tote bags and jackets. It is a Ez machine to use, well made not fuzz...it's all about the price of your toys.

I purchased the Babylock Unity in May and I'm loving it so far. I'm finding myself using the laser guide beam technology constantly. Its very user friendly with its big touch screen. I also love the extra wide 11 1/4" harp space that makes machine quilting going really nice. And the dual feed foot is great too. I've been using it to stitch in the ditch all my quilting before I free motion quilt and its working beautifully! Being a quilter, I recommend one of these models (Crescendo or Unity (Unity also has embroidery) or the Brother equivalents over the Elisimo unless you're really into embroidery side of things and want the camera and the embroidery designing tool that come with the Elisimo only.

I dont have the Elisimo but one feature that I covet is you can enlarge or reduce a lot more than than the other machines. I was told that you can do this on most patterns but some are restricted to changing. Not sure, maybe copywrited ones but Im sure a message will pop up informing you.

The enlarging and reducing of a design on the embroidery machines is related to the amount of stitches needed to "complete" the design so to speak. When you enlarge or reduce an embroidery design it will change the number and size of the stitches.

I have the babylock designers gallery software packs that includes a sizing wizard. And it will only go up/down a certain percentage. After that I have to load it into my Masterworks and manually fix the issues caused by the density changes with sizing.

;) also the designers gallery software is cheaper than an Ellisimo (although I covet it too, for the camera so I can do embroidery on quilts but opted for a LA first)

I have the Babylock Crescendo with the laser light and I LOVE it. I see you live in Wallace, Michigan. There's a Babylock dealer in Green Bay on Military Ave near West Mason. It's the Green Bay sewing and vacuum shop. Jim, the owner, is an amazing source of sewing machine knowledge and sells the lower end Babylocks in his shop. He's affiliated with the full line Babylock dealer in Kaukauna. I still haven't figured out all the bells and whistles yet, but the laser light is amazing for HST and for straight line quilting without marking. If you'd like to try out mine, just PM me and arrange a time-- I'd love to show her off. :)

This is true, almost immediately I went out and bought Embroidery Works so I could change the size of designs to a greater extent than the Unity allowed. I still can't seem to make quilt labels as small as I'd like to make them but will research further.. I'm enjoying the software anyway though because I can see the detail of the designs better but perhaps I wouldn't have needed it had I went for the Elisimo. I gotta say that The laser light feature that comes with the Crescendo and Unity is priceless to me. I use it all the time.

I bought the Crescendo last November and am so glad I did!

You might have to use small fonts. BL does have some. I have most of Gallery plus Masterworks II. There are very small ones in there.