This is an open question, If you're a retired doctor looking for a hobby and all your buddies took up wood working and you want to be different, get into vintage German Deckel mills and fill a shop with fabrication equipment. You can google Cabin Fever get together and spending 6 weeks making beautifully crafted modifications to your gear and churning out bejeweled parts to show off on the internet. I'm not putting you off, I actually think this is a pretty fantastic sounding way to lose your marbles as you age!

If you're a product designer and you want the fastest, most efficient way to get visions out of your head and have real machined parts you can do stuff with? Step up to a 5 Axis CNC from DMG Mori or (if budget isn't a problem) Hermle (the finest mills in the world, Apple just took delivery of 5 of them). The 5th axis stuff isn't about cutting crazy impellers, it's about minimizing setups and very rapidly creating finished parts with as little setup as possible. You'll pay about $300k. You wanna spend a little less? Get a Robodrill or Brother 30 taper machine and really good at 3D tool-path programming.

If you are common CNC hobbyist or in CNC teaching field, and do not have plan to invest too much money, CNC machine made by Germany or Japan is not the suitable choice because of high prices. But, we can try some China CNC machine, they also also powerful to meet you many requirement.In my review, ChinaCNCzone is a good choice, it is a professional China CNC machine factory and Mini CNC supplier for hobbyist with fast service and reliable technical support. They can also supply high performance low cost co2 laser engraving machine and fiber laser marking machine, if you interested, just Google them by ChinaCNCzone.