Squeek,

It is an interesting comparison, but somewhat misdirected. First of all, the development Yamaha did for Motif it has leveraged over tens of thousands of Motifs sold (you have to count the 6, 7, and 8, as well as all the ESes, which share the bulk of features with one another). By comparison, there must have been 10 times fewer PSR 3000s (and 1500s) made, hence this development cost must be amortized.

Second, the Motif and any other "workstation" is essentially useless for playing music in real time, unless you are a budding Wendy (Walter?) Carlos. While most today's workstations have a complement of real, musically useful sounds (some of them quite good), the vast majority of their sounds are musically useless, and you have to wade through a lot of crap to find the good sounds. In fact, band usage notwithstanding, the only way to make music with a workstation is to record it track by track in the sequencer. Hence, having a large sequencer for a workstation is a necessity.

An arranger keyboard, on the other hand, can make real music right out of the box, thanks to having good quality, easily accessible sounds, and musically useful styles, even when played by a relatively mediocre player like myself. It is definitely worth a lot more in musical terms; besides, those styles must cost quite a bit to record, which also adds to the price of the instrument.

I am not defending the practice of overpricing the arranger keyboards, especially the high end ones. However, just because an old, nearly discontinued model for which I have no use is being sold for cheap, does not make me jump to the conclusions.

Regards,
Alex