You also get a surprising amount of audio effects power, the ability to stream audio through the Privia’s speakers over Bluetooth (to play along with songs stored on your mobile device), a useful MIDI song recorder, audio recording directly to a connected USB thumb drive, and wired USB connectivity to Casio’s Chordana Play for Piano educational app for Apple iOS and Android devices (see sidebar, “Chordana Play for Piano”). But the PX-S3000 costs only $799, with retailers such as Sweetwater bundling it with matching console stand ($130), soft case ($130), and triple-pedal unit ($100) for a discounted total of around $1,125. Here’s the Twitter version of this review: Almost everything about the PX-S3000-keyboard feel, realism and nuance of acoustic piano sounds, variety of great non-piano sounds, build quality, auto-accompaniment features, and more-makes me feel as if I’m playing an instrument that should sell for $1,500 or more. The Privia PX-S3000 establishes a new benchmark in this effort.
The company’s best-selling and longest-lived such effort, dating back to 2003, has been the Privia line of portable digital pianos, which offers professional-grade sound quality and keyboard actions while sacrificing neither affordability nor ease of use. Yet Casio has often aimed to transcend this image’s association with toy-like products, an image that has otherwise served them well. In the 1980s, the brand became so synonymous with fun, inexpensive, portable keyboards that Casio is still often used as a generic term for the entire product category, as Kleenex is for tissues or Xerox for photocopiers. Casio has a unique pop-culture legacy among makers of electronic keyboards.