Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

My wife and I needed an embroidery machine to create some work for one of our clients. Not wanting to spend a whole lot of money as the embroidery part of the machine would not be used on a regular basis I read the reviews here for the CE-250 and we decided to purchase one. Considering the 5-1 favorable review report here I must say I was completely fooled. The original 1 star report is right on the money with regards to this machine. The CE-250 requires an immense amount of patience and time. The machine constantly breaks its thread, not only in embroidery mode, but in standard sewing mode as well. I am beginning to hear the "beep beep" of the E-1 warning in my sleep (we do a lot of personal sewing as well). We followed the instructions to a T on set up and threading the machine but still phoned Singer tech support to check on the user error possibility when the E-1 Warning kept continually popping up. The young lady who answered our call was quite nice and assured us we had correctly set up the machine but she did add the following: "slide the thread back and forth through the machine as you are threading it to make sure the sensors read the thread." We followed her advice and are still wasting as much thread as we are sewing. The trump card for me comes when you attempt a embroidery stitch that has more density than the default pattern, the default pattern being rather loose and requiring a lot of hand stitching to fill holes. When you drop the density below the default "4" setting the machine gets caught on the bobbin thread density and will cause the fabric to get caught in the foot thus tearing the fabric. (yes the foot is in the down setting for embroidery). Because of the work we need to do we have had to plod through this but the amount of fabric that has been ruined, along with the time and effort, has far eclipsed any money we my have saved buying this rudimentary machine. If you want some nice embroidery spend the money and get a better machine. If you want a really expensive sewing machine that has some cool attachments for show, buy this one.