My BW and I are looking at a major upgrade from our Viking Rose, and have come down to a choice between the Designer 1 and Janome 10001. (She eliminated the Bernina 200 for a number of reasons - it still uses a proprietary card, its advertised computer connectivity is laughable, and with the computer, we probably wouldn't use its superior local on-screen editing capabilities.)
So we're trying to find some real user experience with the D1 and 10000 systems ... pluses, negatives, things we haven't thought of ...
(I looked droolingly at the Brother PR600, but then we'd just have to go into business!)
Hi Herb, I have the 10000 upgraded by software to the 10001, I owned a brother super galaxie machine before this one, and I have to say the biggest plus for this machine is you dont have a seperate embroidery bed the telescopic embroidery arm comes out from its resting position at the rear of the machine ( you do need a space where you would have
8" clearance) when you embroider this arm is then central at the top, Also another big plus for this is the amount of designs you can store in the memory of the machine and having a compact flash card to get the designs to the machine. which will hold a lot more than the floppy disc. Also you DONT need any special software to get the designs onto the CF card, just drag and drop them, some dealers will tell you that you need customizer to do it. the only downside for me is mine doesnt seem to like my prewound bobbins, but then the janome bobbin does seem to hold a lot more thread than my brother one did. that was the reason I switched to the prewounds to be able to stitch larger designs, guess its made me lazy I can get the large design from the Janome bobbin but I now resent having to wind it lol! If you are in the Uk there still seems to be a few ex demonstration MC10000 around at £1000 saving the last time Iw ent into my dealers he still had one...... do the software upgrade and you would have the
10001 for a lot less money! the only thing you would be short of then would be the giga hoop and the free arm hoop as they come with the
10001 ps im drooling over that pr 600 as well, not sure I would touch another brother machine though, I had nothing but trouble from mine.
We found the Designer 1 very slow in the software to the point of being annoying. This was a couple of years ago now so maybe things have changed.
The Janome uses PCMCIA cards and a serial or USB interface which are very nice. I figured you could put a compact flash adapter into the PCMCIA slot ($15 @ Staples) and a 4GByte CF memory in it. Not sure if this will handle memory that big but you could download every piece of pattern I have every seen or heard of into it via serial port from a 'puter in another part of the house even. We found the Janome very hard to hook up the embroidery bed at the back (watching some users) and the machine very hard to thread without standing up (watching owners again).
Do you mean the software on the sewing machine or their computer software? We've had their embroidery software since we got the Rose, with upgrades, and it's gotten progressively better. From a very bad start it's become almost usable :)
I don't think you'd want to use a CF card much bigger than 32MB tops. They're slow, and it would take the Janome forever to read it to get to the file you wanted. But it's certainly the best available medium - infinitely better than propritary cards and more capable than floppies.
Hmmm - those both looked very easy to us. What did we miss?
Thank you for answering - everything adds another byte or two of information!
you are quite right about the size of the card, it doesnt need to be a large card, I started out with a 8mb card and I havent had the need to go any larger to get the designs over to the machine, not actually sure if I could transfer enough in one time to totally fill the memory on the machine but I dont have any need to do that! I also picked up some small cards(4mb and 2 mb)for virtually nothing from e bay as no one wants them any more and they all work in the machine. even the 2mb cards have held more than I want to transfer in one time! The last batch I transferred back from the machine including the extras the machine writes to the card is 754 kb, this is 32 designs and two of them are large ones, going on this theory i would say a 16 mb card would be more than enough
As for the threading I have seen so many posts about the threading of the Janome and people standing up to do it and I dont find that at all, the bed of this machine is definatly considerably higher from the table than my old brother but I dont have any problem threading it and I am only 5'5" My sewing table is my dining table so I dont have any fancy purpose built cabinet.
The only problem I get threading is the auto needle threader is in my way, lol the auto threader on the old machine never managed to thread a needle so this is habbit I always manually thread the needle and I find the auto device is a little in the way, but its my fault this needle threader will thread a needle but this is of course habbit again!
as for the embroidery hook up, I dont find any problems with it at all. the only problems you get is when you have a large garment covering the bit you are trying to connect to, its not that hard to locate 2 pins into holes!
The 100001 is a fantastic machine. I have to disagree with the comments about threading, it is extremely simple. You have three methods of transferring designs from your PC. By USB, Serial or PMCIA. I use the flash card because it is so convenient. I think you can store around 1000 designs in the machine.
It was the machine software that appeared so slow. When inserting large letters into a pattern you could twiddle your fingers between each letter appearing on screen. I knew this was bad software/hardware design and was very leery of anything else.
I have not used CF cards but I have many SD cards for various gadgets I have. The larger cards are faster to write and read as the technology gets better. > >
Herb I'm surprised you haven't included the Brother ULT.... 2003D is the current one I think. I have the equivalent of the ULT 2001. No I'm not recommending it for the Disney designs, just the machine itself. Great machine, HUGE hoop which I use all the time. Think I had better send URLs which you can read yourself. By the way my friend who has the Janome 10001 asks me to do her large designs, her largest hoop is smaller than mine. She has had lots of problems with the machine but that can happen to anyone, I'm not saying don't buy it for this reason.
Depends on how it's accessed - I have one (photo) program that insists on loading the entire card contents before it does anything, instead of just the directory and letting the user pick. From what I saw, you're probably right about how the Janome accesses it, since it displays the directory on-screen.
They don't mention it, but I don't see any reason why the Janome couldn't use just about any kind of card with the right PC card adapter. Oh yeah - they're now calling it an ATA card. ATA=PC=PCMCIA jus to confuse people, no doubt.
The D-1 software is a bit slow at some things, and reading files from a floppy disk. However, the software updates (the software in the machine) have improved the speed somewhat over the first release.
I'm not sure how large a Compact Flash card the machine will handle. I've heard of people using 256MB cards. When you first use a card in the machine, it creates 24 folders on the card, 12 for embroidery designs and 12 for ordinary stitch "designs". The machine will find up to 100 files in each folder and only uses those folders, so you can create other folders on a card and use them for whatever.
After they've attached the hoop about 3 times, most people can do it effortlessly. Vertically-challenged people may have to stand to see where they're threading the machine. :-)
That would be the software in the sewing machine. The updates have speeded things up, but it's still not the speediest software, however it's not a Microsoft product. :-)
I've found with a number of designs on the card, the machine takes longer to start, but I haven't noticed that it's slower after the start-up. I'll load several hundred designs on a card and see what happens.
Yes, I don't get it because the pinouts on these micro-memories are only enough to do some kind of serial access and that implies sequential access until you get the sector you want and much slower random access. On the other hand it may have many smarts inside and random access internally thus only exporting the data requested and therefore quite fast.
On that note Harddrive controllers are tooting a new serial interface with a small connector. It is stated to be much faster than parallel IDE/ATA interfaces. No other info at this time.
OK - we visited our nearest Brother dealer and ... you are RIGHT!! My wife has pretty quickly put the Brother 2003D or identical Babylock Elagio right at the top of the list. (The Elagio is identical without the Disney designs)
And the dealer looks good, too.
We're already at the point of checking out competitive prices so we can go in and negotiate. Why oh why oh why oh are sewing machines priced like used cars?
The 2001 and 2002 are all upgradable with a download up to the 2003 software standard. If you could pick one up (2001D) without the Disney, it should be about half the price. I bought the 2002D because I thought they may have upgraded the memory or something not talked about. So far I haven't found that to be correct.
Herb I am pleased with your news. It is a very user friendly machine, I didn't bother with lessons but that's just me. Re the noise factor, I have mine beside my Pfaff 7570 and I don't notice any difference between the two.
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