What I did was walk around flea markets until I found a decent direct-drive table with a nice cartridge. Like someone mentioned, direct- vs belt-drive is a matter of different priorities, in my case I was worried about belt wear. Make sure you get one with the LEAST amount of automatic mumbo-jumbo possible, i.e. there are players that automatically lift the tone arm and stuff. That might look nice, but in second hand players it's often broken. I'm probably offending a lot of audiophiles by saying this, but try to get something that looks new. Older players sometimes lack RCA outputs and generally carry more risk in terms of wear. When buying a player that also does 78rpm, be aware that actually playing 78rpm records is done with a different stylus! Then, either get a new stylus for the existing cartridge or buy a new cartridge + styles altogether. I ended up getting a free Akai player from the 80's from an ad on the web with a 35e Stanton 500 cartridge, and so far it sounds great! Good luck!
Pro-ject is far superior that anything for the price. Check the review here http://whathifi.com/Review/Pro-ject-Genie-2/
Technics are a really good turntables, but expect to pay close to $200 for any of them even used. When I started out I had a realistic that had an amazing radio built in, sadly it had an issue where it played records slightly faster then it should of. I ended up getting this one which is a pretty good model http://www.amazon.com/Ion-ION-ITTUS...8&s=musical-instruments&qid=1226522569&sr=8-2. It has good sound for the price and definetly does the job. It's $80 and also converts vinyl to mp3 easily. Yakumo is right too, on all my 80's vinyl i have transferred to mp3, it sounds better then the mp3s they have out there.
