I bought a pinball machine early last year off of eBay ... For a good pinball, you're going to spend in that price range -- that's all there is to it. You can definitely FIND cheaper pinballs, but you are either looking at less popular or less quality machines. I paid about $1600 USD and another almost $300 to have the damn thing air shipped on a massive palette across the US. At least in the US, there are quite a few game shows that you can go to and get better deals and obviously not have to pay shipping. Twilight Zone is a pretty popular machine, so you are going to be looking at more $. The one I got was Demolition Man, which is a terrible movie, but a great machine ... Lots of things going on on the playfield and it's a 5-ball machine.

Something you need to be prepared for is that these things DO break -- there are just tons of moving parts and the ball hitting things over and over again combined with other shaking/collisions causes components to break off circuit boards over time. So I would very much recommend you try to get the manual for whatever machine you get -- it will include all the part numbers and circuit layouts. You will typically buy these separately, but you can pick them up on eBay -- I think I spent about $25 for mine. So what I'm getting at here is that you should either be comfortable doing small repairs (reattaching some mechanical elements, or replacing small components) or you should try to find a repair place that is near you. I've done both -- for the small things I've just fixed them myself (I ordered a replacement opto board for the ball chute and installed it myself), but I had a nastier problem that I took it in for (I have a repair place pretty close to me). They weight like 300 pounds, so fixing it yourself is a hell of a lot easier.

Overall though, they're a lot of fun, and even though they are a bit finicky, I'm glad I got mine. It's also really cool to see the admin screens on them. There's a huge amount of data that these machines collect that I never knew about (number of flips on each flipper, number of times the ball goes out on the left vs the right so you can adjust the leveling, etc).

Feel free to email me if you want any more info -- I'll be happy to help/recommend/etc if I can.

ms