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A digital piano is a modern electronic musical instrument, different from the electronic keyboard, designed to serve primarily as an alternative to a traditional piano, both in the way it feels to play and in the sound produced. It is meant to provide an accurate simulation of a real piano. Some digital pianos, like the Yamaha P155, are also designed to look like an acoustic piano. While digital pianos may fall short of a real piano in feel and sound, they nevertheless have many advantages over normal pianos:

• Compared to acoustic pianos, digital pianos are generally less expensive. It’s the case of Yamaha P155 Digital Piano.
• Most models are smaller and considerably lighter, but there are large ones as well.
• They have no strings and thus do not require tuning.
• Depending on the digital piano, they may include many more instrument sounds including strings, guitars, organs, and more.
• They are much more likely to incorporate a MIDI implementation.
• They may have more features to assist in learning and composition.
• They usually include headphone output.
• They often have a transposition feature.
• They do not require the use of microphones, eliminating the problem of audio feedback in sound reinforcement, as well as simplifying the recording process.

In most implementations, a digital piano produces a variety of piano timbres and usually other sounds as well. For example, a digital piano may have settings for a concert grand piano, an upright piano, a tack piano, and various electric pianos such as the Fender Rhodes and Wurlitzer. Some digital pianos incorporate other basic "synthesizer" sounds such as string ensemble, for example, and offer settings to combine them with piano.

The sounds produced by a digital piano are samples stored in ROM. Despite the fact that a digital piano plays samples, it is not a sampler because it lacks the ability to record samples. It does, however, qualify as a rompler.

Check the Yamaha P155 Review for some examples.

The samples stored in digital pianos are usually of very high quality and made using world class pianos, expensive microphones, and high-quality preamps in a professional recording studio[citation needed].

Digital pianos do have limitations on the faithfulness with which they reproduce the sound of an acoustic piano. These include the lack of implementation of harmonic tones that result when certain combinations of notes are sounded, limited polyphony, and a lack of natural reverberation when the instrument is played percussively. They often lack the incidental acoustic noises associated with piano playing, such as the sounds of pedals being depressed and the associated machinery shifting within the piano, which some actually consider a benefit. These limitations apply to most acoustic instruments and their sampled counterparts, the difference often being described as "visceral".

On an acoustic piano, the sustain pedal lifts the dampers for all strings, allowing them to resonate naturally with the notes played. Digital pianos all have a similar pedal switch to hold notes in suspension, but only some can reproduce the resonating effect.

For the vast majority of listeners, however, professional recordings made with a digital piano are difficult or impossible to distinguish from a recording made with an acoustic piano.

Many digital pianos include an amplifier and loudspeakers so that no additional equipment is required to play the instrument. Some do not. Most digital pianos incorporate headphone output.