Kawai L1

Basically plug 'n play - but lack of extra buttons means accessing extra features is not necessary an intuitive affair. Having said that, there aren't that many extra features to try to access! The manual is thin, but again, there's not that much to document...
Plugs are accessed from under the keyboard, rather than from the rear - not necessarily a bad thing.

Polyphony is only 32, which is not amazing, but I find it adequate for the amateur tinkling I engage in. Limited built-in effects - about 5-6 different voices, and 3 different reverb settings. Touch can be altered to light (for kiddies) or constant (for organ/harpsichord sounds). Has a metronome, basic record function, and MIDI in-out ports. 2 headphone jacks, but no line out (pity that, esp as speakers are not great - see below - but you can use a headphone jack for external speakers). Has a fun but mostly useless "bang any key to play one of 40 preset tunes" feature.
Overall - basic, but fine for the money.
The keyboard is Kawai's older one - fully weighted, but not graded action. I think it's fine, though coming from playing an extremely old piano, it feels a bit heavy. Seems to me comparable to (and perhaps a little better than) the lower end Clavinovas without progressive action.
The sustain pedal is NOT progressive either - just a simple switch as far as I can tell. Pity, that.
I don't use the MIDI function, so can't comment more on that.

I only got it for the grand piano sound.
The piano sound IS reasonably good - AS LONG AS you don't use the internal speakers. They're not terrible, but obviously at this price, they leave a lot to be desired. It gives the piano sound a very thin and tinny sound, which really doesn't do it justice.
Play the keyboard through some reasonable headphones (I'm using Sony NUDE-EX earphones myself) - and it sounds infinitely better (esp. mid range). Even the reverb feature has begun to grow on me a bit (good for concert pianist fantasies).
When not using earphones, I run the sound through some old Boston Acoustic multimedia speakers I have - a moderate improvement on the internal speakers, but still not wonderful (Sony earphones are still better). The BAs have a fairly dead treble, and somewhat muddy midrange. My plan is to eventually get some Altec Lansing MX5021s or Logitech Z2200s to plug in - they seem like good VFM, around $AUS200-300.
Listening through earphones, individual notes in particular sound great. Played with sustain, however, the sound does begin to have a distinct "synthesised" edge to it, esp. as sustain pedal is on-off. So, less than perfect, but still good enough for me.
Playing a scale with sustain does does lead to obvious drop-out once you hit the polyphony limit, but I've never had this problem whilst actually playing a piece - then again, I'm not playing anything hugely demanding from a technical point of view, either.
It seems to me to react smoothly to increasing velocity.
Can't comment much about the other sounds, cos I don't use them. My wife likes the organ sound, though.

No idea. Only just got it, and only use it for home use.

The top is held to the base by 4 screws, and the base itself has two screws per side to hold the side pieces on. It'd be nice to think it would be easy to transport, and it IS relatively portable, but I suspect the screw threads wouldn't stand up to repeated fastening for very long.

I don't think it would take a huge amount of punishment from kids.

No idea. Never been in contact with Kawai.

So you know where I'm coming from, I have played the piano on and off since childhood, finishing up at AMEB grade 7 sometime during high school. I now just play for pleasure and occasionally at church. I regard myself as being a fairly bad piano player, with quite poor technical skills and a bad sense of timing - but just good enough to keep myself happy playing simple tunes. I've mostly learnt to play on a small Yamaha, I think LU series or something like that. My longest serving teacher had a Yamaha U series. I currently have a really old Bechstein upright that still has a nice tone, but a few too many busted strings, loose pins and ?cracked soundboard to be worth repairing.

Obviously, at this price point ($AUS1300 RRP, got mine ex-demo for $AUS1000), you're buying to a budget, not for cutting edge technology. I get the impression you basically get the last generation of stuff, but in the Kawai range, the last generation was actually pretty good - and certainly the piano sound is perfectly acceptable when compared to what else is currently around.

Would I get one for teaching a child? No way - non-progressive and "loose" (i.e. synth style) sustain pedal, plus lack of tactile sound feedback and fake sound would, I think, be like training L plate drivers by using Dodgem Cars - it could create bad habits. For playing technically demanding pieces (e.g. Fantasie Impromptu) (I wish...)? - I think you'd want more polyphony, possibly a graded keyboard, and you'd probably be more demanding from a sound quality point-of-view.

But for someone in my situation - low-to-moderate technical ability, who just likes to play for fun, and would like the option of playing at night without waking the neighbours - or simply would like to practise the same piece over and over again (because it takes me weeks to learn anything) without driving the family crazy - I think the Kawai L1 is just fine - and should tide me over the next four or five years.

Two more generations down the track, I think digital pianos will really start to shine... :)

Re: the selection process...

I've had my eye on digital pianos for a few years. Finally was getting sick of the aforementioned Bechstein. Were seriously thinking about going for a Clavinova CLP150 or Kawai CA1000, but from what I've been reading the price/performance ratio doesn't seem great, especially in the context of a technology that it still maturing (eg. CLP170 supposedly has 32mb of memory for sound samples - but I can get a 40x 256mb CF for $AUS100 nowadays - that's gotta trickle down into the next generation or two).

To confirm this, I started to compare the digital piano sounds by downloading various MP3s off the web...leaders in the field at the time of writing were the Kawai MP9500/CA1200/CA1000 and the Clavinova CLP170. Took a bit of looking around, but was able to find samples of the above, plus the L1 and midrange Kawai CN290/CN390. Also a sample of an acoustic Steinway B.

Conclusion - nothing digital can hold a candle to the Steinway B - kind of expected that, but from the way people were raving about the CLP170, I thought it might come close. Somewhat disappointed about that.

That said, amongst the digitals, I didn't find a huge degree of difference between the mega-cheapy Kawai L1 and 6x more expensive CLP170. Difficult to compare exactly, I know, given different sampling techniques, MP3 encoding and different pieces sampled, but there you go.

I concluded that digital just doesn't cut the mustard yet - and that if I wanted a digital piano for convenient/quiet practice, I'd be better off spending $AUS1000 on something that would do the job adequately until we decided to get/can afford a nice real acoustic (or some fantastic yet to be designed giga digital), rather than throw $AUS6800 at something that would (relatively speaking) sound very mediocre in five years time, as well as depreciating horrendously.

Final selection process was going to the showroom and t