You can watch and read a lot of reviews, but often half of those reviews is about the instrument, and half of the review is about the reviewer.
You also have not said much about what sort of meter you want, but I'm guessing you're in sort of the same ballpark as me.
I've bought some of the el-cheapo's and find them ... inadequate. I've bought two Aneng AN8009 meters, and a few weeks after buying them one of showed a 1% 1k resistor as 960 Ohms, unless you fiddle with the rotary switch or wiring, then it sometimes shows the correct value.
There is also no chance in hell that I will ever buy a fluke. Sure it's quality, and they're reliable, but only people who have an excessive amount of money or fanboys buy those.
I thought about buying an 121GW, but decided not to. It has a whole bunch of unusual ranges, which I really do like, but the quality of the meter is not on par with it's price, but that also depends a bit in how you calculate in those extra ranges, which also need extra hardware. Final decision of not buying it was the closed firmware. If the software for this thing was fully open I likely would have bought it.
I really like the Brymen meters. Quality is quite good (although maybe a tad less then the flukes) but they're half the price or less.
Brymen meters start around EUR70, and you can get "lots of digits" for EUR150 with the BM867s. (But not all digits are meaningful in all ranges).
Just had a look at a store in the EU, (welectron) and they also sell the 121GW for EUR250.
I don't give much about CAT ratings. I mostly use a DMM for low voltage use and the fuses are horribly expensive. (and as a beginner you will blow them. (Having a DMM that beeps at you when the probe is in the current socket while the dial is in a voltage measurement really helps here). On top of that, everything after the main fuses in your house is CAT 2 anyway, and it's not such a big deal if half the meter explodes and lets out smoke if you do something really stupid. Just as long as the casing itself stay's mostly closed and there are no metal parts sticking out it will scare you but it's still reasonably safe (for you personally, the meter won't work anymore after that).
I am also interested in benchtop meters, but the meter I want does not exist unfortunately.
The "professional" meters start at around EUR500, and they all have a 30cm or so deep cabinet, and I have no room for that.
I was intrigued by the (relatively) new Owon xdm1041. The price is right, it has a nice front panel. Nicely readable TFT screen, but in the end it's just a handheld meter in a fancier box. It does not have decent data logging capabilities and it has unacceptably slow auto ranging for a benchtop meter. It is an extremely hackable meter though. The DMM with galvanic isolation is on a separate PCB from the microcontroller, and you can simply wire in you favorite microcontroller and start experimenting. Digilent has an "arduino shield" with the same DMM chip, and also some relatively cheap Chinese models have the same HY3131, but the chip is hard to buy separately, so building your own based on that chip is difficult.
There is a vichi brand tabletop meter that is apparently half decent, but I don't like monochrome LCD's (although it has backlight (Continuously on?))
If you're interested in tabletop meters, and don't want to spend too much, then I recommend to build your own. You can get quite decent ADC with built in voltage reference (such as ADS1118) for a few euro's, and with a bit of tinkering with analog switches for auto ranging and a bit of protection it's easily turned into a decent volt meter, and with small additions you can create other ranges. With 860 samples/s it's also plenty fast for very quick auto ranging.
You can also build a few different meters. Having more then one DMM is almost a must for electronics work. For example to measure current and voltage simultaneously, or monitoring voltages at different points in a circuit simultaneously.
Scullcom has published quite a lot of projects for measurement equipment, and open sourced it, so you can use those projects as a start and make your own variant.