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Date Casio Keyboard was Manufactured


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Does anyone knows how you can tell when Casio had manufactured the PX780 based on their Serial Number. I just purchased a PX780 and on the Box and underneath the Keyboard there is date but it Indicates CARB 06/05/2013, is this the date of keyboard being manufactured or is the date they passed the test for CARB. My purchase date is 06/13/2016. I just want to make sure I did not receive a keyboard that was sitting in warehouse for three years and does not have all the latest fixes. thanks, in advance.

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  • 5 months later...

I would suspect that it is of 2013. But it also may be the date of development. Do they have firmware bug problems in old versions?

Often factories produce the entire production within few months, then trash or retool the production machines and produce something else. Thats why unexpected well selling products get sold out and stay unavailable, unless demand is such high that the company decides to orders another batch. In real life that reissue is often a modified "successor", that may have only subtle software or case colour changes to suggest to be "new". Here are some general hints (from next WarrantyVoid FAQ) to identify manufacturing dates.

case date stamps:

To find out when an instrument was made, it can help to look for copyright dates in the manual, on the box printing or on ICs containing ROM software. But many keyboards also have their manufacturing date marked as numbers or paper stickers on the PCB or embossed into the inside of the plastic case.

In plastic cases beside normal date stamps there are often number tables with dots in rows and columns. Here you see the most common type of this table that was used in later Casio keyboards. But also odd concentrical patterns exist, those resemble the hands of one or multiple clock faces and can be badly confusing.

With Casio keyboards each table row stands for a year and each of the 12 columns for a month, but every table contains a lot of dots instead of only one. I first thought that these indicate the manufacturing and assembly dates of multiple components inside that particular keyboard specimen, but this makes not much sense because they are often spread among multiple years. Thus my theory how the dots come into being is the following: The manufacturer engraves a new dot into the tooling mould on the first day of every new month in that the mould is used to cast plastic cases. This way the last dot in a table indicates the month of the year in that this particular keyboard case was produced, while the others mark all previous months in those keyboard cases were made by the same mould. Thus the first dot indicates when the mould was used first time, which is often identical with the time when the keyboard model went into production.

However because tooling moulds are extremely expensive devices, they tend to be re-used later (and sometimes modified in between) for manufacturing the cases of different keyboard models in the same mould, which makes the situation a bit ambiguous. Thus when there are multiple groups of dots separated by long pauses (e.g. a year) in the table, and the keyboard model had predecessors with the same outer case shape, then there is a high change that the earlier groups stem from those predecessors due to the mould was re-used. Also fine visible outline rims of non- existing openings (e.g. for additional controls, jacks or battery compartments) on the inner or outer case surface hint that it was casted in a re-used tooling mould from a predecessor that made use of them. But also the opposite is possible, namely that the expensive mould was designed from begin on for re-usability and therefore contains modular parts for changeable case holes, those leave the additional fine outlines when not in use. Such exchangeable mould parts can basically even include individual date stamping units, those theoretically may leave multiple differing date stamps on the same plastic case part when the mould consists of older and newer modules. This method can look confusing and is rarely used, but technically simply the newest date mark is valid to date the particular plastic part.

In devices with internal clock and calendar, another hint to the manufacturing year is the displayed calendar default date after reset. Although this sometimes can be misleading (much too early, when defined by the oldest predecessor of its OS or realtime clock), it is often closely related to the date the software was finished (maximum about 1 year earlier) and particularly will never be later than the first official release date it was sold. I.e. when the calendar resets to 1982, the item with that software version is for sure not older, but may be younger.

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