Kawai ES-920 B

Beautiful, affordable, feature rich instrument

As a beginner with just 5 months of experience, I'm afraid that my review won't bring much to your lives, but I'm blown away with this instrument.

It has a beautiful, highly customizable sampled sound with a well developed, easy to use PianoRemote app. Action is lighter than Roland's PHA-50 and far more responsive - Roland FP-90x felt heavy and sluggish in comparison. It feels like there is not that much depth after you press-down a key and the keys bounce a lot upon release, both of which I found distracting at first, but quickly got used to it. There are visible jumps in height between certain white keys, but again that's just minor nit-picking.

Build quality is great, and I don't get how people can have problems with fingerprints - I don't have that issue at all. I don't travel with it, but I appreciate the instrument's weight, as it doesn't feel like it will break the furniture while playing it.

For the first time in my life, I'm actually in love... and it even says 'Goodbye' to me, when I have to go away for a bit.

Beautiful piano sound, so-so speakers, okay features

The main piano sound is really beautiful: sweet, rich, natural and resonant. Lots of options (basic setting + virtual technician) to tweak it to your taste. Not many other sounds (don't expect trumpets, guitars, weird stuff etc, it's basically just keyboard instruments and strings), but generally of good quality. Rythms and automatic accompaniments, though not so many, are a fun feature that a lot of digital pianos don't have.

The onboard speakers are powerful but on the bassy side and lack some clarity for my taste, so I had to increase the brightness and cut the bass to get where I like it more. Fortunately, you can save all your settings and tweaking in a registration bank and recall them with the switch of a button. Also, the action is a bit hard especially in the lower half and the keys are a bit noisy.

Great portable piano

I am really happy to be an owner of Kawai ES920. For me it is a great portable piano. I travel a lot and now at least I can take my piano wherever I go. What I like about ES920? After one month of using I still admire the sound, the keyboard work and the pedal. These features are very close to the real piano (when you push the pedal you can even hear the sound, which produce the freed strings :)). The piano is also very light so I can take it by my own, I don't need to ask anybody for help (I like it very much). I like also how it looks like. The blue lights which are on the top are subtle and they don't disturb during playing.

Till now I've just found only one thing I don't like - when you touch the body of ES920 your fingerprints stay on it and they are very visible. But this disadvantage doesn't have much influence on my very good opinion about this piano.