I am glad to see Roland has not abandoned its participation in the high-end arranger keyboard market. Of course, the proof will be in the pudding, but if they kept what was done right in the G1000, I will be buying one. From George's post, it seems that they have addressed most (if not all) of my gripes - the polyphony, the vocal harmonizer, a good sound set, no touchscreen, but all buttons, the One Touch settings per style, no more ZIP, and solid state storage instead - btw, the 2 GB compact flash card costs about $160, and the adaptor for PCMCIA slot is another $10 - a cost-effective way to store loads of stuff, better than the USB dongle, which sticks out.

I agree with Fran - sampling is something I would not do, if I want a sampled sound, I'd use a laptop with a audio card, and appropriate software. However, it would be nice to be able to download additional sounds into the keyboard's memory.

A question to George - 50 MB of internal memory seems like a lot, way too much for storing user presets, or even sequences. What do you think it is used for? Must be for some audio data.

As for the price, Roland high-end stuff is usually quite expensive. I would guess a list of $3499, and street price of $2900 - this is not cheap, but the build quality of Roland is usually quite good, and to me it seems to offer a better combination of features than the Korg's stuff does.

Regards,
Alex