I have an old Omega and it is built like a tank. I truly have no idea how much I paid for it - it wasn't the most expensive juicer out there. It's slow, isn't noisy and it really does a great job of extracting the juice out of the produce as the pulp is very dry.
I started out with an inexpensive centrifugal juicer. It was OK - much noisier and didn't do as good a job of extracting the juice from the producer. I would sometimes run the pulp through the juicer to extract more juice. I ended up giving it to my mother. She probably ended up selling it at a church yard sale knowing her, LOL!
If you have a fairly heavy duty or high speed blender, you could definitely give Paine's method a try. Like Paine, I like the taste of celery juice. I thought it was pretty icky the first time, but found it to be curiously addictive.
You could probably pick up a second hand juicer for a reasonable price. I suspect a lot of people buy them and then discover they don't use them enough to justify keeping them around.