I just thought I would mention that you can die cut with both the roland and the graphtec, though it requires putting the material on a sticky sheet. One part that bugs me is that I can't seem to do both layers of my sticker material at the same time, I have to make two cuts to make the cut nice and sharp.
Before I bought my graphtec, I bought a summa d60 (at least that's what I think it was) off of ebay and it would have been awesome if it weren't for the fact that it wouldn't interface with my computer even after building a special serial cable. The manual said that it would contour anything anyhow, even if you fed the sheet crooked or if the print itself was somehow skewed. It didn't flex cut though. After having to deal with a terrible seller that tried to blame the thing not working on me, I decided to bite the bullet and buy a new graphtec. Thankfully, the seller didn't even know what connections the summa had, leading him to list it as usb when it was only parallel or serial, let alone how it worked so I was able to return it.
Actually, if your budget is 3 grand, I would consider increasing it the 500 to get the summacut D75-R. I have been seeing heat presses go for less than $500, how much difference is there between brands, in terms of reliability that is.
