Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I agree with the rave reviews for the se-350 now se-400.... for sewing, it's a dream of an upgrade from my battered but still working brother xr-40 bought from costco @ 10-ish years ago. for embroidery it's limited as the max hoop size is not very large,and an extra purchase, but fun to play with. I give it 4 stars... it's a great intermediate sewing and beginner embroidery machine. i purchased this machine (shipped promptly from J&R via Amazon) last month after a lot of research. what i found was.... the brother se-350 was pretty much identical to the brother project runway 6700 machine. the 6700 was recently updated to the 6800, adding 1 usb port, as was the se 350 was upgraded to the se-400 w/ usb port. the project runway machines come w/ a roller case, the se models ship w/ vinyl case. se-400 is 100 bucks cheaper than the PR 6800. the se 350 is still shipping for same price as se-400. I advise purchasing the se-400 even if you don't plan on using it w/ your computer currently as brother will be offering system upgrades you will need usb port for. most software for embroidery sewing/embroidery machines is not Mac compatible so i assumed the usb port would be useless for a while.. Wrong! connect the se 400 via included usb cable to your Mac, it'll show up as an external hard drive, mine was named 'unknown', I do not advise changing this. then add PES files from your computer by dropping them on the sewing machine/external drive. do not add folders of designs on machine, they must be added one at a time to be recognized. (mac will display pes designs in finder as an image...but I've yet to find any software to edit them...) Oh, & remember, it only holds 512 kb of data in memory so you can't load all your designs, unless you have a compatible memory card to load in machines slot. and the designs MUST be 4" by 4" or smaller or machine will not recognize them. (You can buy a larger hoop size to fit more than one 4 x 4 designs on fabric.) And have fun!