new member looking for wisdom

They are all good machines, but my personal favorites are Barudan and ZSK. I own Barudan and have friends working with ZSK. If the thread tension is good you will have very few to no thread breaks on a whole day of operation. My best was 4 days in a row without thread break only bobbin changing.
The stitch quality is excellent on both machines, especially on small lettering and caps they are doing great.
For Barudan it will be easier to find used machines or spare parts...

But ZSK is offering a lot of different hoops and Frames for their machines, right from the factory. If you want to do embroidery on shoes, pockets... They offer frames for everything...

What I don't like:
Barudan: Access of the Lubrication points. On the left side of the head...:)

ZSK: Price for the Frames...difficult to get a used one for a good price.

I am also new to this whole thing.. this post helped a lot! I'm going to create my own and maybe get additional help too!

Hallo mikemillis,
I think in the price class of Amaya, Tajima, Barudan, Happy, ZSK you won't find any bad machines. They are all sewing very well. Amya is putting a lot of new technology in their machines.
But new technology comes always with a price. If you have a ton of extra features it is more likely that something breaks and if something breaks, how complicated will it be to fix it.
Another thing is the tensioning system. All the people I have talked to, are setting the tensioning on their amaya xts manually because the auto tension function is not working very good. If you think you can avoid any tension problems by setting the machine to automatic, you might be wrong. But you have to ask an experienced amaya user about this.
This is still a very good machine, but for me personally, easy repairs and maintenance of a machine is a very important point. That is why an Amaya was not the right embroidery machine for me. On the other hand, the features like speed, easy communication between computer and machine and the small Cylindrical Lower Arm are really nice features. If you call a tech for maintenance and repairs anyway, than it could be the best machine for you.

I agree with what pd87 is posting... the difference is they are in Germany where ZSK is more readily available. I worked on a 20 head ZSK years ago but as we are in Texas finding quick maintenance help was limited to say the least. Great machine, no doubt! But when something when wrong we were lost.. So go with what is prevalent in your area so any downtime you experience should be as minimal as possible.

Here the dominates are probably Tajima, SWF and Melco. Much easier to find help on any of those three in this area.... having worked on Tajimas for over a decade when it came time for me personally to put my money down I went with SWF. (ha, yep that is correct) Because by that time SWF had worked out most of their initial rollout failures (they were pretty bad at the start!@!) and the machine is for all practical purposes a different colored Tajima but at a much lower price! We bought two bridge model 1501s and a specialty modified 4 head for LESS than the ONE specially modified Tajima version would have cost!!

I tend to shy away from the Amaya... have posted on other threads about this. Perception to me (only because of all the plastic) so NOT based on anything other than that... but still it is my perception that those are more hobbyist machines. not industrial. I mean if you look at a Tajima, SWF, and Amaya side by side it seems pretty clear one is quite a bit different. TRY, just TRY to knock over one of our SWFs. lol I know this is wrong, I get that.... but often perception is greater than reality.

Here is an image of one of our machines in my study at home. Fit through our standard doors and is a monster machine! lol best of luck!