Digital piano is a current electronic musical instrument especially designed to serve primarily as an alternative to the traditional piano, in both the way it feels to play and in the sound it produced. Some digital pianos are as well shaped to look like an acoustic piano. As digital pianos have many advantages over normal pianos.

In most of the implementations, a digital piano offers a different variety of piano timbres and normally some other sound as well. For instance, a digital piano might have settings for a performance grand piano, an upright piano, a tack piano, and different electric pianos like the Fender Rhodes and Wurlitzer. Some digital pianos as well incorporate other basics "synthesizer" sounds like string ensemble, and provide settings to combine them with piano.

The sounds offered by a digital piano are at times PCM samples available in ROM. Despite the fact that a digital piano plays models, it is not a sampler because it needs the capability to record samples. It does, however, be eligible as a romper. Other, more superior brands (like Yamaha & Kawai) use other sound sampling systems like AWM (advanced sign memory) or Harmonic Imaging.

The samples stored in digital pianos are generally of extremely high quality and shaped by using world-class pianos, costly microphones, and other high quality preamps in an experts recording studio.

Digital pianos do have restrictions on the authenticity with that they replicate the sound of any acoustic piano. These as well comprise of the lack of implementation of harmonic tones, which result when some mixtures of notes are sounded, restricted to polyphony, and a lack of innate reverberation when the piano is actually played percussively. They as well lack the secondary acoustic noises related with piano playing, like the sounds of pedals being low and the related machinery broken up within the piano that some in fact consider a benefit. These limitations relate to most acoustic piano instruments and their sampled foils, the difference normally being described as "visceral".

For the wide majority of listeners, however, expert recordings made with a digital piano are hard or not possible to differentiate from a recording shaped with a original piano. Many digital pianos comprise an amplifier and loudspeakers so that no extra equipment is necessary to play the instrument. Most digital pianos include headphone output.