As I see it, it doesn’t cost that much to introduce some new concepts, but it takes a lot of resources when you have to make a keyboard like PSR, where each sound and style should be very playable and convincing; we can imagine how different it must be to make, for example, a guitar sound or a saxophone. Sampling can seem an easy process at first, but then you have to make it sound natural throughout the whole keyboard range. Playing Yamaha you take it for granted, but on Roland Juno DS I notice that the main piano is sampled a bit different on one note, and it is a big deal. And everything is crucial when it comes to styles, with Yamaha we are taking it for granted as well, but in reality when a style is not good enough it starts to sound mechanical and repetitive and handles chord changing very poorly. I imagine, Yamaha goes back and forth a lot of times when they are making, for example, a sound of an electric guitar, they sample it, adjust, see that it doesn’t work right and start again until it’s done properly. When you play the keyboard you don’t want to feel that it just playbacks samples, you want to feel that you are playing an actual instrument.

The thing is that once you have all the technology to create, for example, Genos, you can then sell it by parts in your smaller products, right down to PSR-E series. But if you are just focused on entry-level stuff, you don’t really have any content to offer for a bigger price. So Casio cannot just decide and go into professional segment of arrangers.