Preamble
I haven't bought an instrument since the mid 1990s, my Technics U90 organ. That's because I haven't seen anything better that I want to play, or that's affordable.
I'd like a portable Hammond, but I'd want two keyboards and a full pedalboard, and a decent speaker system (probably a real Leslie), all of which is super expensive for what it is. And you have to buy speakers, since none are built in, as well as keyboard stand and seat, so it's getting as complex to set up as a drumkit. Full all-in-one consoles are large and harder to transport, but you wheel them into somewhere and plug them in, and that's all you have to do.
I dropped into a music store looking for some sheet music, and on the way out had a look at the keyboards they had on display. I'm an organist, and don't really want to play piano, but do join in with other musicians on their piano, and have no way to practice something as a piano piece at home. The two instruments are not played in the same way, you have to convert how you'd play an organ piece into a piano one. It's percussive, the notes die away after a while, and you have no bass pedals. While it'd be nice to have a proper acoustic piano, I don't have the space, I don't particularly like new pianos (the keys are ridiculously heavy to play), old pianos can need a lot of repairs, and it'd be nice to have a portable instrument I could take somewhere.
One problem I have with playing any kind of piano is that I find most of them have keyboards that are way too heavy to play on. I don't consider this a good thing, I consider it a bad thing that they've never wanted to make them easier to play. Having to pound the keys to play quietly and bash the hell out of them to play loudly is murder on my fingers. Often I get to play on 100 year old upright pianos that have an easy keyboard to play, and yet you're still able to play with dynamics (quiet or loud, dependent on how hard you play them). I don't know if that's down to design changes over the years, or that older pianos have just loosened up with age. Conversely, my Technics organ keyboard is just a bit too light, and the white key length (the wide bit past the end of the black keys, towards you) feels too short.
In the music store they had a series of keyboards. There was about two or three which I'll call synth keyboards, the usual sprung plastic keyboards, a plethora of sounds, and buttons and menus galore. I ignored them, and paid attention to the three electronic pianos they had (a Roland and two different Yamahas). These had pretend piano keyboards (weighted with some kind of hammer action), and very few obvious options. It's hard to judge the feel of each of them, as they were all at different heights. But I liked this one best, as the easiest to play out of the three, and the nicest tone (they were all using their own internal speakers). Oddly enough, it was the cheapest, though price wasn't my determining factor.
The keyboard
The keyboard feels weighted, in some way, though still too much for my liking. It's somewhere between the heavier real piano keyboards I've played on and the lighter modern ones, but nowhere near as light as a vintage piano. And I can see that there is some kind of hammer system (by looking through the holes in the casing), but it's a simple system rather than copying the whole mechanics of a real piano. You can feel some action through the keyboards, but they don't have the feel of release when a real piano hammers have hit the strings and fallen back to let them ring. It does feel like you're pushing on a lever with a weighted hammer hinged to it, it firmly whacks into something at the end of its travel, though stays in contact with it. It's supposed to feel like the graded hammer system (GHS) of a Yamaha grand piano, where the bass keys are a harder to play than the middle keys, and the treble keys a bit easier (not that I can notice it). But there's something of a see-saw feel to it, you can continuously wiggle the keys up and down in a way that a real piano doesn't do.
Looking at the service manual, and someone else's disassembly of the piano, I wasn't far off. There's a hammer with one pivot point midway along it, and a linkage between it and the keys. They give some sense of motion to pressing the keys, some approximation of the mechanical feel of playing an acoustic piano. There's 8 different weights to the hammers, heaviest at the bass end, ranging to the lightest at the treble end, not that I can really tell any difference in feel across the keyboard. The “weight” is a thin metal rod (which I doubt weighs very much), and has a slightly longer length for the heavier keys, combined with the leverage required to move it (where I suspect most of the feel comes from).
To me, it feels like the pivot point is too close to one end of the lever. It feels too heavy, and putting too much effort into moving the hammer. I'd like a lighter feel. I don't think I could modify the keyboard by shortening the weighted bar enough to make any useful difference, and that'd also affect how the keys return when released. And changing the pivot point would be impossible. Perhaps moving the stop bar for the rest position of the hammers might help.
Being pedantic, I'm not sure that I'd call the keyboard “weighted,“ seeing as the keys are just hollow plastic. For some pianos they have put weights within the keys, themselves. Whether that's a good thing, or not, I don't know. I don't see a good reason to make a keyboard harder to play than it needs to be. But this keyboard's weight comes from the metal rods that they're levered with.
Also, being pedantic, the hammers aren't really hammers. They don't hit the sensor, they're just a bit of weighted metal to give an illusion of playing a real piano, and there's a felt covered bar above and below all the hammers to limit their range of movement. The plastic keys hit a couple of sense pads below them to trigger the piano sound generators. These kind of buttons are the same that wear out, or gunk up, in tv remote controls and cheap computer keyboards.
As an organist I've found that my fingers soon tired playing this, and after a few songs I found I wasn't playing some notes hard enough with my left hand to produce any sound. Yet I could play for an hour or so on a real (very old) piano. On the other hand, I tire even quicker if I try playing some 1970/1980s pianos. I doubt I could find an electronic piano keyboard that played the way I desire, no modern real piano does, they're deliberately built heavier than I want. For an opposite point of view, a couple of friends who are pianists have played on my new piano and didn't mind it, or enjoyed it. Much better than a synth style keyboard, and within the range of strength required of playing real piano keyboards.
You can get electronic pianos that have a real piano mechanism in them, so they feel like you're playing a real piano. Of course they don't have strings in them, the hammers hit some kind of sensor, instead. But they are more expensive. And it all really depends on what you want out of a digital piano. Do you want it to feel just like a real piano, or is near-enough “good enough?” And is your main concern something that sounds realistic enough, despite the feel of the keyboard?
Having said all that, every piano I've played on has felt different, some just awful, so what a piano is supposed to feel like is somewhat academic. But if this is supposed to feel (and sound) like playing a Yamaha grand, I can only think “yuck.” I'd be horrified if I'd spent the amount of money a grand piano cost, and got something like this. To me, the worst aspect of various pianos is the large amount of force you have to apply to the keys. Some modern pianos have very stiff keys, and not from the weight of the hammer mechanism, you can feel the piano keys scrape against something as you press them down. Deliberately making something harder to do than it needs to be just smacks of bad design, I don't care if it's “traditional.”
I don't really know what method the keyboard uses to determine dynamics. There's two kinds that I know of, pressure sensitivity where it determines how hard you pressed, or velocity sensitivity where how fast the key moved determines the dynamics. But looking at the service manual, there's two rubber pad switches (like in cheap and nasty computer keyboards, and TV remote control buttons) next to each other for each key, so I suspect it's measuring a time difference between them actuating (velocity sensing). The switches are hit by a peg projecting below the keys, themselves, the hammers just whack between two padded bars for their range of movement between pressed and released.
The keys, themselves, don't have a hinge or pivot. There's a thin flexible bit of plastic that attaches the keys in place. Looking at it, I don't think that's robust, at all. This is one keyboard you definitely should not abuse, it's not going to survive the antics of Jerry Lee Lewis playing-style. Perhaps not even heavy-handed glissandos.
The tone
Once again, friends listening to it and playing it liked how it sounded. It's supposed to sound like a Yamaha grand piano. It's supposedly sampled from one (somewhere I read something saying which model, but I can't find that info again), with a mixture of samples of light and heavy playing, to give a good approximation of real piano dynamics (gentle and heavy playing doesn't just affect the volume, but also the timbre, as it should do). Though I don't know how many levels there are to these dynamics (I've heard claims about how many levels, but they seem more than I can discover by experimentation).
One thing I dislike about digital pianos, and this one had this issue at times, is some of them sound like a faked plucked guitar string rather than a struck piano string. I don't why I noticed it sometimes, but not all the time. It may be the acoustics of reflected sound when I've played it in different places.
There's two small speakers in the cabinet facing downwards through grilles in the bottom of the piano, and there's very thin slots in the top where better models have tweeters behind them, but this model just has empty space into the cabinet below them. Listening to it from the playing position it's clear that Yamaha have tried to make it sound like a piano, where the bass to treble range is spread across the keyboard width, and it sounds like sound is coming from the whole body of it, rather than just a couple of speaker holes.
Having downward facing speakers will bring some problems. If you sit it on a table, you will muffle its output. If you're playing in a slightly noisy room, the speakers don't face you and won't be as loud as speakers that do. Of course a real piano doesn't have speakers, and the sound doesn't come at you from the keyboard. But a real piano produces a lot more sound, from a wider area than two tiny speakers.
The other thing I don't like about synthetic pianos is how dead they sound. The tuning is usually perfect, which would seem a good thing, but having no slight imperfections takes away a piano's character. And although an acoustic piano can have annoying resonances where some string always adds its mark to everything you play, the very slight tuning errors in a real piano give a slow beat frequency between notes that are otherwise too clinical, and an acoustic piano can be tuned to any temperament that you like. And all the strings resonate, slightly, when any note is played, even when the dampers are resting on them. Take off the dampers (with the sustain pedal), and every string adds to the sound of the played notes. When tuned nicely, this makes a real piano come alive. I've never found an electronic piano that can do this. They try to compensate for this with various electronic reverb effects of simulated room accoustics. Usually with too much echo (bounce-back) and not enough sustain (where a note lingers as it reverborates around large space—think of a cathedral, not a rectangular building, with stone walls and irregular reflective surfaces all over the place).
There are no line outputs, but there is a headphone socket, and that can be used to play through an external sound system. It does sound better through better speakers, but that's only to be expected. Also as expected, plugging something into the headphone socket mutes the internal speakers.
I'm chiefly describing the main piano sound, but there are other voices as well. A brighter acoustic piano, two different electric pianos, two pipe organs, synth strings, two harpsichords (one single string per key, and the other with double octave strings playing together), and a vibraphone. Probably the simplest explanation of the two acoustic piano voices is one sounds like the lid is closed, the other with it open. One electric piano sounds rather like an electric piano, a bit of cross between a Wurly and Rhodes. The other sounds like what many 1980s synthesisers falsely called a piano, with a brief tinkly sound onto top of a deeper voice with chorus effect. Speaking as an organist, the organ voices sound very fake, one pretending to have a few bassy pipes on, the other with more treble pipes on as well. The strings sound like many synth strings, though I could hear the loop repeating very quickly. The two harpsichords sound okay, but I've never heard a real one in person to compare against. The vibes sound quite nice, but there's a definite sweet spot in the middle of the range that works good, and the faked lower voices than a real vibe sound very fake. Then when you go above the normal range, it sounds like a too-mellow glockenspiel. There's no speed control for the fans.
I've made some recordings using it on my YouTube channel, though you'll have to go hunting through some of the more recent uploads to find it. There isn't a dedicated piano section, at this time, but if you search within my channel for “plastic” you'll find the clips where I've mentioned playing my plastic piano.
Connection options
A 12 volt DC input. It runs from one of those wall-wart plug packs (12 volt, 1.5 amp), not directly from AC mains power. While annoying that you have an easy-to-lose (or break) power supply, instead of an ordinary AC mains leads plugging directly into it, this does offer the possibility for running it from an external battery pack if you were a busker (there's no internal battery compartment). Their plugpack had plastic wings sticking out the side of the mains plug side, that meant it was impossible to plug anything else in next to it on a multiway mains powerboard (so they ended up getting cut and filed off to be only as wide as the main body of the plugpack). I wish manufacturers would stop doing annoying things like that.
The DC plug-pack that Yamaha supplies is a switch-mode power supply. While very light-weight, switch-mode power supplies often have a life-span problem, particularly if they get hot. Though it wouldn't be hard to replace this one, there's nothing particular special about its specifications or connector. Transformer-based power supplies last for decades when a decent-sized transformer is used, and are much quieter (electrical-noise-wise). And on that note, their power supply does what many do—it floats the output at half the mains, so if you plug the piano into anything you get horrendous noises as you do so. Putting 50 to 120 volts into the input stage of audio equipment is a good way to wreck it, and doesn't do speaker systems any good, either.
So, because of all those annoyances, plus the limitation of being tethered to a wall socket, I opted to go for battery-powering the piano when I took it out on gigs. Brief tests have shown it draws under an amp when playing loud (such as leaning on as many keys as possible with the volume at full blast), and you can get several hours playing out of a reasonably sized battery (such as the 7 Ah sealed lead acid gel cell batteries commonly used for alarm systems—I used one in a carry bag when I first took the piano out to gigs). Later on, I velcroed a 2.2 Ah battery onto the side of the piano (it was smaller and more convenient), and it lasts well in excess of the amount of time that the piano was actually used at the gig. Not to mention that it turns the piano into a completely self-contained instrument if you don't have to plug it into an amplifer.
A USB MIDI output. This may require a driver on some computer systems, it may act generically on others. The keyboard can send MIDI data, but cannot receive it. So no using the piano like a pianola, nor plugging in an organ bass-pedal board. I briefly tried getting it to talk to MuseScore on a Mac, and it worked without any special drivers, but MuseScore's MIDI features are rather rudimentary—I couldn't find any working way to record as you play, just single-note entry where you strike a note on the piano to input a pitch and then, separately, set its length via the computer keyboard. There's a suggestion of such an automated recording feature, but it doesn't work on my installed versions of MuseScore. MuseScore on CentOS 7 Linux completely ignored it. It worked with GarageBand (Mac software), in the sense that I could play live through it using the Mac as a synth voice generator and record the notes played. But you couldn't sequence a score on the computer, and have the piano provide the sound, so you may as well use any cheap and nasty keyboard for note entry. And if you wanted to connect it to equipment with a traditional 5-pin DIN MIDI port, you'd need an interface box (sometimes called a MIDI host).
A ¼″ sustain pedal input (and only a sustain pedal). It came with a small square foot switch that feels like you're stepping on a kitchen sponge, so I bought a pedal that was more like a proper piano sustain pedal at the same time I bought the piano, and I'd suggest doing the same thing. Perhaps keep the original pedal as a remote for something else (e.g. such as a rhythm unit, or a recorder). It's supposed to support half-pedalling with a suitable compatible pedal (Yamaha's FC3A), and with a bit of fiddling with electronic bits to build one based on other pedals with pressure sensitivity I can get it to have a shorter sustain but not the half-pedaling action that its manual describes (a different sustain action for the bass strings than the rest). And on that note, it doesn't have the reverb of all the other strings (that you're not playing) vibrating along that an acoustic piano has. Instead of having room/hall/stage reverb options, I wish the piano had a simulated acoustic piano strings reverb option.
Since I don't have a FC3A variable sustain pedal, to do “half-pedaling,” I don't know how it feels to use it. In the sense of do you feel a different resistance as you press down, to be able to find the right spot? Such as a weaker spring at first, then a stronger spring as you press further. Or are you just relying on hearing the piano sound differently while you try to find the right amount of pressure on the pedal. I'd mocked up a test rig along the latter lines, and it was next to impossible to find the half-pedal position. I have a Xtreme Accessories FS310 sustain pedal which happens to have a break-before-make DPDT foot switch, so I was able to fit a resistor to come into circuit mid-way between pressed and released. Also, while adjusting the resistance value, I found that it's incredibly fiddly to find a spot with medium sustain—it's a hair-trigger between none and full. Though, to be honest, I'd found it was similar when trying half-pedaling on some acoustic pianos: When the dampers are off, the strings ring. When the dampers touch the strings, they don't. It's next to impossible to get the dampers just barely touching the strings.
A ¼″ stereo headphone jack. This is the only audio connector. This does mean that if you plug in to connect to something else, you can't hear what you're playing without that something else also driving some other speakers. So I am considering a modification to either stop the headphone jack switching off the internal speakers, or adding separate line outputs.
Looking at the service manual, I can see a couple of ways of disabling the muting, but the internal amplifier may not be strong enough to hear yourself well enough at a gig (I'm just talking about things like open-mike nights, not rock concerts). And the headphone amplifier output is resistively coupled to the headphone socket, so it ought to cope with a mono jack being plugged into it (which would short out the right audio channel). I did some tests to see how it sounded just listening to the left or right audio alone, and it was fine. But I thought it sounded slightly better with mixed left and right, so I made an adaptor box with a mixing feature for those occasions where I'd have to use a mono amplifier (it splits the stereo headphone jack into two left and right line output jacks, has audio transformers to produce balanced outputs, and uses the switches in the TRS jacks to join left and right together if only one of the output sockets is used).
The connections are quite recessed, so if you're stuck with putting your piano against a wall the jacks won't be bashing into it. And the socket labelling is just an indent in the black plastic making it difficult to see which of the ¼″ connectors is the pedal or headphone socket.
Some of the special features
Keyboard touch sensitivity dynamics: None, hard, medium (the default), or soft. Although you can tell differences, it doesn't seem to be strong differences between each level. Though setting it to no touch sensitivity dynamics means everything is played at a level as if you hit the keys at a medium level. I also noticed that when you turn the volume control down, it seems to reduce the dynamics as well (you can't bash the keys for a very loud sound, and gentler playing doesn't go as quiet as you might expect). Some amount of audio compression for very quiet playing is a useful feature, particularly if wearing headphones. This option is supposed to be kept how you've set it as a stored setting, though I've noticed it changing by itself from time to time.
Transposing: You can transpose up or down by 6 semitones. It's a bit cumbersome to operate, you couldn't use it to insert a keychange in the middle of a song. There's no indication that the transposer is on, nor by how much, and I've accidentally left it on at times (to the confusion of others trying to play along). This setting is reset each time the piano is switched on.
Tuning: There's presets for A above middle C being 440 Hz (the default) or 442 Hz, and tuning can be adjusted in 0.2 Hz increments from 414.8 to 466.8 Hz (which involves a lot of keybashing to make large changes). Oddly the manual uses different octave numbers than normal (typically A4 is 440 Hz, yet the manual calls it A3). If you have to custom tune the piano (such as to play along with other instruments), you're going to have to do this each time you switch it on, the setting is not stored (almost no settings are). This configuration is kept how you've set it as a stored setting.
Instrument voices: Mellow piano, bright piano, pretend Wurly/Rhodes electric piano, plinky Yamaha electronic synth piano, basic flute pipe organ, harsh flute & strings pipe organ, synth strings, single-string harpsichord, dual-string harpsichord (octave coupled), vibraphone. One or two of them can be active at the same time. This setting is reset to mellow piano each time the piano is switched on.
Dual player mode: It splits the keyboard in the middle and both players get a middle C in the middle of their half, though either side can be shifted up or down one octave. But I wouldn't really call it a duet mode, duet playing usually means one person plays bass end and the other the treble end. Less commonly, it means two people playing two different pianos. I say “less” because few people will have two pianos in their home. This setting is reset each time the piano is switched on.
Dual voice mode: Any two of the voices can be played together, so you can have piano and strings, for example. You can make one louder than the other, and shift the octave they play at separately. One thing that hadn't occurred to me, though saw someone else mention it, was you could put the two piano voices together, this produces an interesting effect. When you do this, it puts the second one an octave up. You can shift it down so they're in unison, and this produces another interesting effect (though not always nice). In essence, you get a piano with more strings per note, which aren't identically in tune with each other, giving you a real chorus effect where each note beats against things individuall (unlike variable time delay chorus effect devices, where everything gets swooshed along at the same time by a common low frequency oscillator). This setting is reset each time the piano is switched on.
Reverb: Several types (room, small halls, large hall, stage, or none), and adjustable reverb volume, but no other adjustments (timing, feedback, etc). These settings are reset each time the piano is switched on to small hall, and medium reverb volume.
Metronome: There is a built in one, and you can accent the first beat so that you keep your place in 2/4, 3/4, 4/4, time signatures, etc. However, the method of setting the tempo is cumbersome (you type in the BPM you require using some keys numbered 0 to 9). We were amused how the accented beat-one bell sounded like an old-fashioned cash-register drawer-bell. You've played another bar, that'll be another dollar… The tempo is reset to default each time the piano is switched on, but the time signature and and volume options are kept.
Auto power-off: You can decide whether the piano stays on until you switch it off, or if it switches itself off after a period of being left idle (which will be either 15 or 30 minutes, depending on which version of the firmware is installed). This option is kept how you've set it as a stored setting.
Confirmation beeps: You can decide whether you'd like the piano to beep at you when you change a setting (letting you know that something has changed), or to act silently (giving you no clue whether a setting has changed, or not). Given that it's next to impossible to change any settings while playing (such as changing instrument voices simply by pressing a button), it's a bit of useless option. This option is kept how you've set it as a stored setting.
Demo songs: There's a bunch of demo songs, one for each voice. And there's a bunch of piano demo songs.
Unfortunately most of the features are hidden, and there's no indication of what their statuses are. And many of them reset back to their defaults each time the piano is switched on (you can force a reset of everything by holding down the right-most piano key as you switch the piano on). All features are accessed by pressing a button on the top, in combination with one or more of the piano keys, but only some of them are labelled. You're going to have to refer to the manual, and either memorise them, or make some cheat sheets up for any features you want to use that aren't labelled. I ended up sticking some labels above the keys for some features I might want to use, but are never going to remember where they're hidden.
Most of the features are well beyond what's needed if you just want to play piano, though transposing is very handy if you are accompanying someone who needs a different key, and retuning is very useful if playing along to something tuned differently. Pretty much, you can just switch it on and play.
Build
It seems quite sturdy, weighing around 11 kg. Being 88 keys it's not small. The keys are full size. The box is taller than you might expect, having some mechanical action inside would mean there needs to be room for it, though some of the height seems to be more about giving the box rigidity (considering the deep ridges and struts in its plastic base). I'd far rather a heavier, stronger, material was used, and the piano was more compact, even if it did make the piano a bit heavier to carry.
It's taller than the desk part of an acoustic piano, making it harder to get your knees under the keys with the keys at the right height for your fingers. I've already smacked my knees into it many times. I have an extreme distaste for modern furniture built so you can barely get your knees under it, making you sit back and hunch forward to use the surface of a table, and this piano suffers that some problem. You don't play a piano sitting away from it, you want to get your knees somewhat under the key desk.
Its height might make it too high if you sat it on top of an ordinary desk. On my dining table, the keys were almost at the right height for playing standing up, but definitely much too high to play sitting down. And you'd be covering up the speakers which are underneath the piano.
There is an optional wooden furniture base for it (two sides and a back panel). I'd expect that to place the keys at the right height for a conventional piano stool. Though appears to be discontinued, and I don't know if the similar bases for other similar models of piano will fit.
You can get generic folding stands (usually in an X formation) that the keyboard will sit on top of. This presents another problem with trying to get your knees underneath, the struts of the stand are in the way, and you crack your knees and shins on them. I view those kinds of stands as being designed for playing while standing-up, and after one-too-many times of hurting my legs on it, I built a box stand for it. The X-stand may seem simpler, to look at, but I found it to be an on-going pain. There are other kinds of generic stands, but I've not seen any in-person. Some look wobbly, fragile, or cumbersome.
There are four threaded mounting holes underneath, so you could attach it firmly to another kind of set of legs. I just had a quick try out with some M5 bolts, and they fit nicely.
The white keys are shiny white plastic, the black keys are dull plastic (faked ebony). You should be able to do a glissando without shredding your fingers like the ivory keytops on some vintage pianos do. Though they still have the little lip at the edge, and that is thin enough to cause pain if you catch it. And all the keys have a hard edge with quite a corner on them that I find does hurt the joints on my fingers when I catch them (I can't easily span an octave) in a way that the keyboard on my Technics U90 organ does not. One of the advantages of the traditional keys on old Hammonds, and some Lowreys, was the rounded edge of the white keys were easy on the hands and fingers when doing glisses and wide spans.
The main body is a bit rougher plastic (I don't particularly like the finger feel of that, and it does get easily marked by anything that rubs against it).
There is an undersized music rest that slots into the top, it's only two pages wide, and about half an A4 page high. If you put loose A4 pages on it, you need something behind them to keep them upright. This is a pet peeve of mine on various instruments, long ago I made cardboard music book folders to (mostly) get around that problem (full height, and three or four pages wide). But you're stuck with clipping wide scores to it, because there's nothing under the cardboard to hold up the sheets. The music rest seems strong enough to hold a tablet computer, though it does sag a bit under the weight. I may get someone to make a plastic full-sized music rest to fit into the slot (slightly bent at the bottom, with a ledge to sit the sheets on), and three or four pages wide. Otherwise, you do what some people do, and put a separate portable music stand behind their piano. That's okay at a gig, but at home I don't have the space for that. So I am thinking of either a custom (wider and taller) music rest that slots into the piano instead of the original one, or attaches to the piano stand that I built. I've knocked up a hybrid that's attached to the base of the piano, with a prop against my stand to hold it at the right angle, while I consider modifying the piano stand to attach it to it.
And while a robust music rest could have a light attached to it, instead of the desk light that I've attached to the piano stand, I found that I got annoying reflections off the keys, sheet music, or tablet screens, if the light is mounted near it. I put quite a bit of experimentation into finding positions that lit the music evenly, and the keys, without getting glare into my eyes from reflections, or directly from the light, and found it needs to be positioned over the plastic strip where the keys emerge from, and a fair bit above head-height (see the photos). About the only other option was the same spot above the piano, but lower down, with the light shielded from view by a shade, but it gets in the way of turning pages or getting a mike near a singing pianist.
Summary
This is an older 2015 model, but still being sold. I guess they saw no reason to discontinue the design. That, or there was a lot of stock left over to sell. I'd call it an entry-level model. It's simple in looks and features, it's inexpensive (around $700 Australian, in August 2023), but not cheap and nasty. I'd say it's a reasonable choice for a beginner to learn piano on, or practice at home if they don't want an acoustic piano, and they want something that's simple to operate (it's reasonably simple to operate, only a bit convoluted if you actually want to use some of the special features). Maybe useful for composing with a computer. Noisewise, it's a bit too clunky for recording acoustically, you'd want to plug directly into it.
In making it appear simple, there's very few controls, very few labels as to the second functions of the keys, and the only indicator is the power-on light. So you have no clues to what functions you have selected, how much reverb you've added, how many semi-tones you've transposed, etc. Though that won't matter if you're just going to use it as a piano. And after a year or so of playing it, I find that I mostly ignore the features. I've dabbled with the other voices while tinkering at home, but that was it. Occasionally the first electric piano voice (a wannabe Wurly/Rhodes) is a good choice for some songs, but I haven't really cared for the others. The one feature I have frequently used was the transpose feature, so I can play in the range of a singer. And it's quite annoying that there's no indication that it's on, or what setting it's at.
Related to that, every time the piano is switched off just about everything resets back to default. So if you always wanted to change some things from their default settings (such as reverb options), it's going to be annoying that you'll always have to adjust those settings every time you switch on the piano. The touch sensitivity dynamics is supposed to be a stored setting, but I found my preference was often reset. While the switch it off and on again routine makes for an simple method of doing a reset, I'd prefer for all my customisations to stay as permanent settings, and to use a more deliberate master reset feature (which is: hold down the rightmost piano key, and switch the piano on via the piano's power button). One of the things I like about my Technics organ is that most of the controls are mechanical, and you can see how everything is set up. Once set, they stay that way until you change them. And no, I don't get the organ into some unworkable state that I need some kind of master reset. But that might be different if several different people were using it.
The very basic USB MIDI out, without any MIDI in, is so limited as to be virtually pointless. One of the useful aspects of MIDI was the ability to connect musical instruments together, but that is 5-pin DIN MIDI, and this keyboard doesn't have that. It has USB MIDI, and that's only really useful with a computer (you'll need a USB converter, or host, to be able to use proper 5-pin MIDI). The other aspect I'm familiar with was recording multi-track audio, where you might play something, record the MIDI data for sequencing, arrange things exactly how you wanted it, do more sections, then use the sequencer to play the instrument while you record its audio output (rather than only use the keyboard just as an input controller, and have some other sound generator produce the audio). But since this piano has no MIDI input, nor a line output, you can't do that. Leaving one more thing that I'd actually like to be able to use it for—having a computer transcribe something I play into sheet music. Unfortunately the software I tried doing that with (GarageBand on the Mac) only supported it in a very crude manner. Since MIDI has no concept of bars, your transcriber needs to play a metronome (or rhythm) for you to play along to so it can fit the notes into bars. To do that correctly, without producing a pile of oddly timed 16th notes, triplets, or other wierd transcriptions of your playing, where you were expecting much simpler quarter and eighth notes, it would need to take into account the (sometimes variable) delays of data latency, human inaccuracy, and have adjustable quantisation. The same issue arises if you want to do multi-track recording, and get one track in sync with another (GarageBand's nonsense notation of what you've played is quite useless to read, you'd have to do it by ear). If it had any options for controlling those things, I couldn't find them.
The speaker system is quite low-powered. While loud enough to play at home, it can be too quiet at a gig (especially considering that the speakers are pointing away from you). If conditions weren't in your favour, you'd need an amplifier for your audience, and you'd want foldback speakers for yourself. This isn't a presumption, it's what I experienced taking it to open-mike nights (sometimes it isn't loud enough). I was kind of expecting that, even though I was just playing for one person singing in a medium sized room—we could have done it completely unamplified if I was playing an acoustic piano. And without foldback speakers, you hear yourself as a time-delayed echo back from the room.
I'm an organist who's played just a few different pianos, various hundred-year old ancient uprights, a few modern ones, one baby grand, and one grand. It does feel like some of them, not as hard as a few 1970s spinets, not as easy as really old upright pianos. A bit too hard for me, and I doubt I'll ever get used to that. Sound-wise, it sounds quite like a piano, but tuned too precisely, and lacking the resonance of all the other strings when the sustain is off, with quite a quick decay, and sustain seems too long when the sustain pedal is held down (and, again, lacking the resonance of the other strings).
Friend's who've heard and played it liked it, the only criticism being that it was heavy to carry. Though, at around 11 kilograms, it's the same weight as the professional video camera I used to lug around everywhere on jobs, and its tripod weighed the same, too. So I was used to carrying twice the weight of this keyboard, but I'm glad I rarely do that anymore. I do wish that my keyboard carry-bag had a handle on each end, so that two people could more-easily lug around a heavy keyboard between them.
Potential design improvements
If I had the ability to make improvements to the model, I can think of a few: A taller and wider music stand (or an optional larger one that could be bought), upward facing speakers with a more open speaker grille, and detecting the sustain pedal switch mode as their plug is being connected (not just when the piano is switched on).
Of course I'd like mode buttons and indicator lights, but they're deliberately omitted from this model, and they are there on other Yamaha pianos.