Well, it depends with what you're after.
Just a midi keyboard (don't buy these small, crappy 1,5 octave ones you'd find in a rappers garage though; got to be completely useless), an electric piano (with weighed keys and a grand piano key range), a keyboard (sampler without too many editing possibilities) or a synthesizer (I assume you want the digital sampler type; this one lets you edit a great deal of the prerecorded samples, add effect chains etc.)
I for myself have a Roland XP-10 which has been my trusty master synthesizer for almost a decade by now.
It is very good in my opinion; good quality sounds, a lot of editing possibilities (filters, envelopes, effect chains, etc.), a standard 5 octave keyrange (this
can be too few at times, but you can just prepare and use the transpose button for most purposes. Also, I doubt I could even fit a 7-octaver in my den
)
Of course it is midi compatible, has built in arpeggiator functions, custom layer splitting / combining, mod- and pitchwheels (your average keyboard usually doesn't have these) and so on. Being a synthesizer, it features no built-in speakers and thus you need to connect it to an amplifier.
No disc drive (yeah, these are mainly for recording / importing midi sequences; the older samplers used them to import extra samples as well, but how good quality can you get today on a 1,44Mb disc?), but you can just connect a sequencer to it for that matter (I've got an QX5).
This fancy piece of equipment I would guess cost about $2000 when it was new; you can probably get a used exemplar for about half that price.
(If you like, I could list some more features of it, but this post is already pretty long
)
"I kören hörs de brummande busarna Björnligan och Gondolen"
