Choosing between a digital piano or keyboard won’t just come down to just the physicality of the instruments, though of course their practical functions are very important. The differences between the two also encompass what you can play on them. Notably, keyboards have far greater tonal variety than digital pianos.
Digital pianos are not just aiming to recreate the experience of playing a real piano in how it’s built but also in what it sounds like. After all, a piano just sounds like a piano, and if your goal is to play one, it would not serve much of a purpose to load a digital piano with many different sound qualities that stray away from traditional piano sounds.
On the other hand, keyboards offer an array of different sounds that bear little to no resemblance to the sound of a piano. They may have the key layout of a piano, but that’s simply for the basic optionality of notes. In terms of sounds, keyboards can approximate the sound of a piano, but they can do the same for many different instruments, as well as sounds that are purely electronic and don’t sound like any traditional instrument at all. For instance, the Yamaha PSR-SX900 keyboard comes with 850 premium voices and 415 styles.
Although digital pianos and keyboards may look the same at first glance, the two could not be more different in application and operation.
