I've owned several good, and some not so good, semi guitars over the years including Gibsons, Tokais and Epiphones, so I'm pretty familiar with the type.
As it was out of the box first...
The build quality and the finish was excellent. I couldn't find a single flaw in the finish, even around the F holes. It's bang on 8 pounds weight, so not overly heavy. The neck is a bit on the thicker side, but not too thick. It's comfortable and feels solid. Everything works fine plugged in. The electrics and the stock pickups work fine, although the sound is a bit dark compared to my other humbucker guitars....but simply turning the treble up on the amp a bit fixed that.
The negatives were the fretwork and the tuners, which made the guitar feel like the budget guitar it is. It didn't stay in tune and there was no way to set it up with a comfortable action.
Luckily, I have experience setting up guitars and doing fretwork so I spent an hour or 2 blitzing the frets and the nut slots, and setting it up carefully, which has tranformed the 'budget' guitar into a very, very nice guitar... that now feels way above its price.
I may replace the tuners sometime, but there's no rush. If I were still gigging I would replace them and maybe upgrade the pickups, but as a sofa guitar it's ok for as it is. Adjusting the amp slightly is a lot cheaper than buying pickups, and the resulting sound is actually very good....and I'm one of those guys who usually wants to upgrade a guitar's pickups. These are OK, and I'm finding myself comfortably noodling on this guitar a lot without thinking about it.
Definitely a keeper.
