Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsAmazing digital piano for the price. Provides all the basics.
Reviewed in the United States on December 7, 2019
I'm a digital piano enthusiast. I have owned several high end DPs over the years and I currently have a top of the line Kawai digital that cost many thousands of dollars. I wanted a second piano for my kids to play on and use with online piano lessons (needed a MIDI connection). This piano fits the bill perfectly and is what I would recommend to anyone who is on a serious budget but wants a piano. It's also as lightweight and portable as I think it's possible for a full-sized fully-weighted piano to be.
The sounds are OK. The speakers on it won't win any awards, but you can connect it to nicer speakers if you want. It only has three voices: classical piano, modern piano, and electric piano. Really, 99.99% of the time, people just want a classical piano voice, so this is what you want for a home user.
The action is realistically weighted. It's slightly lighter weight than my Kawai but well within normal acoustic piano ranges. If anything, it's probably closer to a typical acoustic piano than my Kawai is. The keys do impact slightly abruptly (bottom out) at the end of a stroke. Certainly more abruptly than my Kawai, but again, within the range of normal for an acoustic piano. i have a slight preference for the Kawai, but it's not a whole universe apart. My kids feel the same way (and of course, my Kawai cost about 15X as much).
The touch curve is very sensitive and not adjustable. You don't have to play very hard for this thing to get pretty strident. This is good for people who have a softer touch, but not for bulls in a china shop, like me. I think it's good for kids...you don't want them injuring themselves playing too hard on the keys.
The pedal that comes with this is pretty poor. It's one of those wide black plastic things. Very unlike that of acoustic pianos. Luckily, you can buy quality pedals that are compatible with this very easily. I would recommend purchasing a better pedal to anyone who buys this.
The connectivity is great for a DP at this price. It connects through USB to do MIDI, it has ports for speakers, headphones and the pedal. What more could you want? This piano also supports high resolution midi (thousands of levels, rather than just 127) which most digital pianos do not. So it would be a good candidate to use with a computer software piano like PianoTeq or Ivory.
It's pretty common for people to ask me for a recommendation for a good digital piano "for the price." In the past I have recommended Yamaha Arius pianos frequently but from now on I'm going to recommend this. For people on a budget, this is the perfect piano. I wouldn't go any lower (or you lose important features like a quality action and the full 88 keys) but this pretty much checks all the boxes for something a home user, beginner, or student would want. Kids should take a piano like this to college with them, for example.
Nice work, Casio.
