Hi bpatters55,

Personally, I think you'll need to ask yourself a few basic questions first. From there I think you'll be able to begin to decide about which board to purchase.
Things to consider.
1) Money
2) Number of keys that are essential for you
3) style or keyboard, light, semi-weighted, fully weighted, graded vrs balanced (for weighted boards only) aftertouch needed?
4) necessary features such as, on-board seqeuncer for recording and/or just playback. Sequencer capacity.
5) User banks/patches.
6) edit ablilty?
7) real time editing?
8) expandability and if you want expansion, check out the expansion cards available first, you might find none of the cards are worth it, thus rendering the expansion ability useless.
9) sampling? Something I know little about.
10) Money (or did I mention that already)

There's a hundred decent keyboard/synths out there on the market. All have different features and limits. You have to figure out what features are essential to you, which you would like but are non essential, and which features you could absolutely careless about. Like for me, on board sequencing, I could care less about because I prefer to use my PC. But I'd really love to have play-back ability.

I'm finding you could probably break down the boards into these categories
1) Workstations
2) Performance synths
3) Digital Pianos
4) Controllers

Many boards may do 2,3 or 4 of the above. I like a performance synth for playing live. a workstation for the studio. Which brings me also to another question you need to ask yourself, what will you be using the board for and how will you be using it? Weight of a board is an important factor if you'll be gigging alot. Most digital pianos and workstations are heavy 50 pounds and up.

basically I think you need to ask yourself some questions first.

I bet if you could ask your question again in greater detail, perhaps you'll get more exact responses.

Best wishes
Bob
<><