You have likely heard your music teacher despair at students wanting to learn on the keyboard. The keyboard is smaller, cheaper and because it samples a limited amount of piano sounds, is very limited in it’s capabilities to express the player’s dynamics.
Therefore, many would assume that the same counts for the digital piano.
The digital piano however, is not a keyboard, and is built specifically to imitate the acoustic piano as closely as possible. They have as many notes as an acoustic piano and weighted keys to mimic the touch and feel of an acoustic piano. But do they sound the way an acoustic does?
To put it briefly, no.
While the technology that goes into a digital piano is designed to mimic the piano as closely as possible; it suffers from a similar limitation to the keyboard. It samples sounds instead of creating them.
When you play a key on an acoustic piano that sets in motion a number of reactions inside the piano that ultimately result in the hammer striking the string. The real benefit of this is that depending on how you play a key, the dynamics will sound different. The digital piano of course does it’s best to imitate this. But like a keyboard it can only play sampled sounds, it doesn’t create it’s own based on your playing. While the number of sounds per note it has sampled are much larger than those found on a keyboard it still won’t be able to play as expressively as an acoustic piano because it will always be limited to the number of pre-recorded sounds it is capable of. It can only play the sounds that it is programmed to play based on it’s interpretation of how you played the key.
There are many benefits to a digital piano. It’s more portable and lower maintenance than acoustic piano but once it eventually does break you will likely have to replace it with the newest model. Whereas an acoustic piano can last multiple generations if properly maintained.