SC-450Plus CB Vintage Series : Reasonable value

I bought this as my first guitar, and while it has its disappointing shortcomings, overall its a good value guitar.

Pros:

- Surprisingly stable tuning, despite cheap tuning machines

- Great play-ability at medium action heights

- Smooth fret edges

Cons:

- Plastic nut "grabs" strings during tuning, causing "clink" sound

- Tuning machines have horrible dead spots

- General dead spots/unevenness in all adjustment screws, including bridge height and intonation adjustment screws.

- "Rise-in-tongue" above the 15th fret, causing strings to fret-out at low action heights

- Very thick poly finish, sticky on neck

- Fairly muddy humbuckers on 10-46 strings, but can be avoided with brighter amp/dialed down low-end.

Despite the negatives, I'm mostly happy with the guitar. I wish they'd had the SC-550 in stock when I'd ordered however. I feel like a lot of the cost-savings are the root of a lot of these problems I've had.