Band Saw

A band saw drives a continuous toothed blade in a loop around two or three wheels, feeding a workpiece into the moving blade from below rather than spinning a fixed circular blade the way a table saw does. That continuous-loop design does two jobs almost nothing else does well: resawing thick stock into thinner slices, and cutting curves a straight-bladed saw simply can't follow.

Resaw height is the number that actually matters

Resaw height -- the maximum distance between the table and the upper blade guide -- is effectively the thickest board a band saw can stand on edge and slice through. A saw with 6" of resaw height cannot touch 8" stock no matter how good everything else about it is. Wheel size and motor power are tradeoffs that follow directly from the same question: how much resawing the shop actually plans to do.

Blade width, and the tradeoff it sets

Narrow blades (1/8"-1/4") cut tight curves -- the reason to own a band saw for scrollwork or curved parts at all. Wide blades (1/2"-1") track straighter and resist drift, which is what resawing and straight ripping actually want. Most saws run either, but expect to swap blades between a curve-cutting session and a resawing one rather than owning one blade that does both well.

Setup matters more here than on most machines

Blade tension and tracking affect a band saw's cut quality more than almost any other machine's setup does -- a poorly tensioned or badly tracked blade drifts off a straight line regardless of how capable the saw is on paper. Learning to set drift angle and tension properly, rather than blaming the machine for a wandering cut, is most of what separates a frustrating band saw from a genuinely useful one.

Safety

Keep fingers well back from the blade's front edge during a cut, use a push stick on narrow rip cuts the same as on a table saw, and check blade tension before every session -- a blade that snaps under tension, or that's so loose it wanders off the wheels mid-cut, is a real hazard.