Finally got my hands on a PSR-EW410!

[SciNote]

Yes, the music store finally had the PSR-EW410 on display.  But not the PSR-E463.  However, I would assume that everything I am about to go over applies to both keyboards.

As I expected, there are no sounds with built-in portamento, at least among the panel synth lead sounds.  I was hoping for it, but I figured that, if that feature was there, it would've been noted somewhere by now.

An awesome feature is the ability to add reverb and chorus to the drums.  This really brings out the sound of the drums and gives them energy, and this alone makes me tempted to upgrade, though the funds are not available to me right now.  And, with the reverb/chorus knob settings, as well as the filter knob settings (cutoff/resonance), you can have different settings for the drums and the keyboard sounds at the same time.  In other words, as an example, you can have the drums have full chorus and reverb, while at the same time have the keyboard sound have only moderate chorus and reverb.  This, however, is NOT the case with the DSP settings.  If you turn on DSP and set up a mode, like phaser, and then apply it to the keyboard sound, if you then push the "target" button (which tells the keyboard whether some of the live knob functions will control either the keyboard sound or the drums/accompaniment), then the DSP effect is immediately turned off on the keyboard sound and then applied to the drums/accompaniment.  You cannot have it on both parts.

Note, however, that these style sound enhancements get cleared if you switch styles.  So, if you're playing live and want a certain reverb, chorus, or filter setting for the style, you have to set it up every time you select a new style, unless you save the style in a registration, which of course also saves the style's tempo.  This is a bit cumbersome.  If there are, say, four styles that you use a lot, you could use one bank of registrations to just save your favorite styles with your favorite chorus, reverb, and filter settings.  Then, for the other banks of registrations, you can save them without a style, so that you can then change the sounds you are playing without changing the style settings.  Of course, this now forces you to use one bank of registrations for this purpose, reducing what is available for just sound patches, which is significant when there are only 32 possible registrations available.

Another rhythm improvement, compared to the E453, is that if you select a rhythm (style), and then set up a tempo and start playing the rhythm, if you then switch styles while the rhythm/style is playing, the tempo does not change.  This is also the case on my old PSR-E433.  But curiously, on the E453, if you switch styles, even with the style playing, the new style will start playing at its default tempo, which could very well be different than the tempo you originally set up for the first style.  Not usually what you want when you are playing a song live and want to switch styles in the middle of the song.

Also as expected based on the manual, the registrations now get saved with the DSP's on/off setting -- something that was very weirdly left out of the E453.

When you save a registration, the process is now nearly instantaneous.  And even when saving a song recording, it only takes about 7 or 8 seconds, compared to 10-12 seconds on the E433 and E443 (not sure about the E453).

A couple other things.  I would say that the keybed is on par with most recent Yamaha PSR-E400 series keyboards, which is to say very good.  And I know that there was some discussion about the color of the background lighting of the display when the videos of the keyboard were first introduced, based on the difficulty of really determining the color from a computer video.  The color is not white, but not blue either.  I'd call it a very pale violet -- almost white, but not quite.  Some Casios have a similar display color.  This did not make much of a difference to me, compared to the blue display on my E433, but I guess the lighter background of the E463 does make it easier to read.

So, there's what I was able to discern about the EW410 and, I would imagine by extension, the E463.  There were a few surprises that I was not expecting!