Beware of China Mini Lathes.
There are lots of people using Chinese Mini-lathes to do perfectly good work on the smaller scale.
The key is that one has to pay attention to where one buys one. Importers like LMS and Grizzly in the US and Warco and ArcEuroTrade in the UK do tend to drive higher QC standards in the equipment they import.
The other key thing is to understand that
even with these better QC'd products, the end customer is still kinda effectively getting a kit that has been preassembled for shipping convenience.
That end customer is still going to have to tear down the lathe that turns up on their doorstep and do a fair bit of fit and finish themselves. The fact that ArcEuroTrade offers PDF pictorial guides on their site that detail pretty much every step in getting their Seig mini-lathes up to an acceptable standard, should tell us something.
There are a couple of benefits to this for a beginner though. Firstly, assuming the customer is willing to and capable of doing the work, they'll learn a lot about lathes. Secondly, having effectively rebuilt their lathe from scratch, there's a non-zero chance they'll have a better ability to discriminate between what's the result of their failings and what's the lathe's fault.
Obviously the latter only applies if the potential beginner buyer wants a project before they start using their lathe to make chips. If they don't, they probably should go to Precision Matthews in the US, or in the UK, go to Warco and buy one of their larger lathes.
I actually have been mulling all this over in my head recently and I think I might post something on this as I think the machining community has missed a trick or two when giving purchase advice to beginners.
You see, I have a mini-lathe from what you might call a second tier importer (not Vevor bad, who seem to assemble their lathes from the scrap bins of the major mini-lathe producers, but possibly not quite up to decent importer standards) and yes, I do wish I'd got myself an ML7, but the reasons I didn't, were down to omissions in the advice available (especially for people like me in the UK).
And yeah, I wish I'd know about this forum when I did my purchasing.