Yamaha PF-15

Very very easy to use. Presets aren't brilliant, the piano sounds in particular are onloy just good enough for practise.
Bought mine secondhand for ??40!! and didn't get the manual but hard to see why you would need one as it is so simple.

Umm NO to all features except tjhere are 10 different sounds and a stereo chorus button.Still good enough for practise with headphones

Super keyboard feel but base end needs a hard push in some modes to be heard over the treble end.

Mine must be at least 25 years old and it's still works - what else could you need!

Who knows?

If it was stolen then I wouldn't buy another at any more than ??50.
I've been playing piano in church/home/classical for about 35 years and have an accoustic Yamaha Piano at home to use but needed something with headphones now I have a young baby - this is a good piece of kit for the price I paid.
I would prefer it had a better piano sound and it's wetted my appitite for a much newer electric piano when finances allow but it's good enough for my needs as it stands.

Couldn't be much easier; switch it on, turn it up, it plays. As stated elsewhere, there are ten sounds and the hardest thing, for me, is remembering which ones sound good. There are a couple that are just awful and it's embarrassing to hit one of those in the middle of a song.

I tested the polyphony by pushing down with my whole arm on the keyboard. My guess is that it's 88 notes. The keyboard feels quite good; a bit heavier than my at-home piano but really pretty fine. There's a stereo chorus button; strictly on or off. There are no expansion capabilities (but see elsewhere about the Kenton MIDI kit though I can't see that it's a very good deal for more than the piano's worth). Oh, and there's a plug for a sostenuto pedal (in addition to the sustain pedal), which is kind of neat but not something I use myself, being an upright piano kind of guy.

If you play this through a good keyboard amp or PA, there are good sounds. The on-board speaker don't do it justice. I'm most pleased with the Rhodes/Vibes sound (hard to tell which it is) and there are a couple in there that are nice for bass. You can't split the keyboard, though, so if you choose a good bass sound you're stuck with the rest, too. Really, though, compared to a competent modern board it's barely adequate.

This one has lived in a commercial woodworking shop for a billion years and seems to be perfectly happy despite the dust. I had some trouble with the sustain pedal a while ago but that seems to have fixed itself. It weighs a ton.

It's not my keyboard, just the house piano at a place I go to jam. If I owned one it would collect dust--I have a real piano; why would I play this at home? And it's really too heavy to gig with. If someone offered me one for free I'd probably politely decline but if a bar had one set up, I'd be pleased enough to play it.

This is pretty much a plug in and go keyboard. You can instantly have sound from it in seconds. (Just wait for it to warm up)

Polyphony can be a real downer sometimes, especially on flowing sustained passages. You can hear the lower bass notes just cut out and it can be so irritating. But if you're not too sustain-y... You're fine.

It also has onboard chorus and tremolo effects you can assign to each sound. The tremolo takes a bit to figure out how to edit.

What I like about this board, is it has onboard FM EQ. You can raise the low tones, and lower the high tones, and boost the mids just a little bit, depending on how you want the sound to be - warm and thick or cold and metallic, thin.

The PF80 also has midi capabilities, but I've honestly never felt the need - I would rather just buy another board. But don't get me wrong - this board can be really expressive. I just don't think it should be a board used for a solo act (or a trio, like myself). I do often hear that it's an amazing MIDI board. However, I wouldn't know...

No sequencer. (Don't need one)
No expansion. (Unless you count MIDI...)

It's got 10 sounds: Piano 1, Piano 2, Piano 3, EP 4, EP 5, EP 6 (my favorite), EP 7 (sounds like a very 80's clav), Harpsichord, Vibraphone and Clavinet. For my style, the only tones worth using are 1, 2, 6, harpsipchord and clavinet. Tone 1 is soft, mellow and has a strange glassy acoustic piano feeling. It's nice. Tone 2 is a bit thicker, and bitey more of a growl - especially in the bass range. Tone 3 is very unusual. The attack of it is almost excruciating. I never use it. Tone 4 is I guess Yamaha's attempt at producing a Digital FM rhodes. It is plinkey, and too vibraphone-esque, but I've used it a couple of times and gotten a decent sound from it. Tone 5 is freaking wierd. It sounds like... rain? It's plunkey and bizarre. Tone 6! AMAZING. It's so thick, and warm and very very jazzy. The closest thing I can compare it to is probably a Hohner Pianet meeting a Wurlitzer 200A and going out to lunch with a mellotron. It has a sort of a trumpety sound to the first listen. But it's all about how you use it. Tone 7 is worthless - like a cracked out 80's clavinet. The harpsichord is actually quite nice sometimes. Especially those low bass registers - can make a nice bass track. Vibraphone - worthless. It sounds like tone 5. Cheezy, and impossible to take seriously. Clavinet - can be quite nice. But it's very thin, and metallic for a clav.

I've dropped mine out of the back of my truck, and had it fall over onstage, and it still works like a dream. I'm pretty sure it'd still be kicking if you put it in the middle of the freeway for a week. It's incredibly heavy... I don't have a case for mine, but continue to gig with it and I will amit - the highest key sticks now, and I've repaired it numerous times and it keeps going back to a permanantly depressed position (valium anyone?) but I never play that key anyways. And the vibraphone key sticks sometimes. But the board is 20 years old... A key and one button is a reasonable sacrifice, I'd say.

Customer Support? What is this you speak of?! (Yamaha barely remembers that they made this piece...) In short - good luck finding anyone who knows what it is.

Truly, this keyboard is such an awkward admission from Yamaha. It's caught between the warm analogs of the CP series, and the cheezy thin tones of the newer stage pianos. I think you'd be much better off with a CP35 from Yamaha - truly. But if you find one for less than $200 - grab it. It's been great to learn on. (Especially practicing those Vivaldi harpsichord pieces...)

Very easy to use:
- 88-note keyboard with a good, smooth weighted action.
- Pushbuttons select sounds in two banks of five.
- The best tranposition switch I've ever seen (just slide it across to transpose on the fly!)
- Stereo Chorus

Plug it in, switch it on and play.

The PF-15 was Yamaha's flagship FM-synthesis electronic piano when they released it in the early 80s. The keyboard action is very good. While it doesn't have the range of modern touch-sensitive keyboards, I actually think it feels smoother than most.

Polyphony is unlimited.
The only built-in effect is Stereo Chorus, which works well.
No MIDI in the original, though I've installed a Kenton MIDI kit which works well. Be aware this is a job that requires precise soldering to the pins of a (probably irreplaceable) LSI chip - NOT for beginners!
No sequencer - it's just a piano.

The basic piano sound doesn't really try to imitate a piano (or if it does, it fails miserably!). There are six piano/electric piano sounds, two of which I really like, a respectable vibes, good clavinet-ish 'harpsichord'.

Now that I've added MIDI, I'm using it with an Alesis NanoPiano for piano, which I'm very happy with.

I've owned it from new for about 15 years. It's travelled a little. It's very solidly built and has never given any trouble.

I've never had to deal directly with Yamaha.

If I lost it, I'd probably replace it with something newer like a Yamaha P200 or Roland RD600.

I'd recommend it to anyone who's looking for a cheap instrument with an excellent action (you see them secondhand for A$400ish), or for someone who's learning and isn't that critical of the sound but needs a good piano action and fulll keyboard (or the ability to practice with headphones).

I can also recommend the Kenton MIDI kit to those who already own a PF-15.