[Greg Needel]

i have used a bunch of types of lathes and most professional lathes are comperable to each other. the thing you need to look at is the price of the accessories and what is available. for example different lathes require different jaws and have different requirements when it comes to collets and so on. you will want one that has easy available parts for replacement and innital purchas. you also want to look to see if there is a taper attachment (making life much easyer), what different tail stock supports they have (drill, point, clamp, etc) all of this stuff is important.