Dyson DC23 TurbineHead Canister Vacuum Best Quality

Ok, my sister has a Dyson and loves it.
We bought a DC23 because we recently completed renos and wanted something that would suck up, but not spread unhealthy reno dust.
There are two ways that vacuums can inadvertently spread dust, either through an exhaust that is not well-filtered, or by the exhaust stirring up dust on the floor that we haven't had a chance to pick up yet.
Prior to purchasing the DC23, we were under the impression that this unit solved both issues. It doesn't solve either.
We thought it could be operated while carrying it in one hand and vacuuming with the other (as one might do on stairs or or when vacuuming tall curtains, etc). We were surprised that when we called Dyson, we found that it was not designed to do this, and in fact we could see that our unit leaked air (and dust) from the seal between the hose and the bin when the unit was lifted. We ended up with a visible dust trail on the unit itself.
Not good. Though we initially thought we might have a defective unit, Dyson's people told us that the unit wasn't designed to be used while carrying, despite the fact that nothing about this is said in any of the Dyson literature available with the vac or online. When the Dyson serviceperson told us this, we wondered what other hidden caveats there might be. In fact, he told us another: the Dyson may break down if you try to vacuum up even a small amount of drywall dust or talc. This luckily isn't an issue for us, and we wouldn't be surprised if other vacuums also had problems with such fine dust.
Another big downside for us is that the Dyson blew a blast of air along the floor, which doesn't help when you're trying to pick up the dust (and, as mentioned above, there's no use trying to lift the unit to avoid this problem, because this caused the seal to break and dust to leak out of the unit itself).
So, unless we would be content to drag the vacuum along our pine floors, stirring up dust that we hadn't got to yet along the way (in addition, we found it rather heavy for its size and we felt it risked scratching our floors) and unless we were content with dust spewing out of the unit itself when we lifted the unit up then we quickly realized we would be very unhappy with this thing in our house.
We have since returned it and purchased another unit made by another, smaller company that also offers a smallish, well-rated (by Consumer Reports) cannister vac with a HEPA filter that blows the exhaust upward, instead of along the floor. The company that makes our replacement doesn't seem to spend nearly as much of its efforts on advertising as Dyson -- I'm not going to mention their name because I don't want to give them free advertising, but a little bit of research should be able to turn them up.
We have, so far, had no issues with seals breaking or dust leakage (that we know of) with this replacement and we are very, very happy that we no longer have a Dyson in our house.Get more detail about Dyson DC23 TurbineHead Canister Vacuum.