help choosing a turn table

@OP, Rega or Technics are the safest choices. If you decide you don't stick with vinyl, they are pretty safe from a resale perspective. Both are good enough to listen to long term or to move up from if you decide you really like vinyl. However, if you don't have record collection, you do have to factor in the cost of the records, which can quickly exceed the cost of the turntable.

@lewm and OP, regarding Rega's design philosophy - it's really only an issue of contention with the more expensive turntables, rather than at the  pricepoint the OP is considering. The strong points of Rega's original design were  - for the budget - a well toleranced bearing, a suspended motor (albeit with fairly rudimentary supension - a float glass platter and a really well designed and toleranced arm (once they replaced the original Acos with the RB300). Many of these features have been copied by other manufacturers since, but the fundamentals - plus improvements to the motor and the bracing on the arm/chassis of the latest models - continue to make the Rega P3 a very competitive turntable. Roy Gandy's belief that resonance in turntables is best tackled by making the TT as skeletal as possible - and the downstream design and engineering consequences of that in the expensive Regas - is where the contentiousness arises.