>>322636I do recommend people try water bath canning before paying for pressure canning equipment. For two reasons. It's pretty cheap and easy. If you don't like this sort of thing then pressure canning won't be for you either. Also, you'll have most of the equipment you'll need to process stuff already for your water bath canning and will only need the pressure canner itself.
Having said that, the start up costs can be pretty cheap. It really depends on how much you'll be canning and how much you want to pay. Small pressure canners for home canning are pretty cheap. But, if you regularly have lots of stuff to can during your harvests then a larger one will be much more time efficient.
For myself I have 2, a medium and the largest I could find shown in this image ("All American Pressure Canner 941" 41.5 Quart on the right). The latter was like $400ish when I first bought it, but has probably paid for itself 6 times over by now in food savings.
When you have harvests exceeding 1 ton of vegetables, pressure canning is taken to a whole new level.
