Advice on multicolour vinyl machine

[Neilb78]

Hi Everyone, Myself and my wife do embroidery at the moment, however we are looking to expand by purchasing some sort of Vinyl cutting machine. We have done research but are a bit baffled by it all. To create multicolour vinyl for example a rainbow, would we need to purchase a 2 in 1 vinyl cutter/printer? or is it easy enough done on just the cutter? Is there any machine we should avoid or any which are recommended? Thanks in advance

[logobear]

a vinyl cutter creates flat areas of colour that are heat applied, if you want to create a rainbow you would need media in all the colours you want, and you would create vector artwork in the arch for each and cut and weed it. then you would apply each colour - probably separately to create the rainbow. There might be slight alignment issues, and it would be time consuming.
Cut vinyl is cheap and good, but usually only used for 1 or a small number of colours.
Craft Robo etc are entry level - cutting upto 30cm wide, but most commercial media is 50cm wide so a wider cutter would be sensible. Graphtec and Roland are good brands. prices from £100 to £1400
If you want a combined printer/cutter then more complex machine costing from about £5000 by Roland (versacam) or Mimaki which creates a single cut out of your print. It will be much slower as a cutter, and media more expensive, but does have many other uses, - signage, vehchle wraps, stickers etc
I advise a decent s/h 60cm wide cutter first

[Johnny]

Have you looked at a specific machine? Or a few?