Harley Benton DC-Junior Faded Cherry

I decided to buy this guitar based on excellent reviews. Based on my experience with this guitar, I think most of those reviews are biased because of the low price i.e. "it's great for the price".
I think guitars should be scored regardless of their price. In my opinion, an excellent guitar needs to have the following:
- Ability to set a really low action. That means around 1 mm on low E string and 1.5mm on high E.
- It should stay in tune
- It must sound great
- It has to have a good hardware

Looks are subjective, I won't comment that.

This guitar didn't satisfy some of those things out of the box. In particular, the nut was cut too high, making it really hard to play and impossible to set the action low. In addition, the quality of a nut wasn't great so the guitar had issues staying in tune. I fixed this by installing a high quality nut which solved the nut-side action and tuning issues.

While this improved playability significantly, I still wasn't able to get the action as low as I wanted, bends would choke and string were buzzing (with correct amount of neck relief). Guitar had quite a few high frets that had to be levelled. I could set the action really low after fret levelling.

The Roswell pickup is really great. Although a bit underwound at 7k, it sounds amazing and it gives the guitar almost a telecaster vibe with p90 growl. It sits way too low though from the strings so you'll have to buy a shim to raise it for about 3 mm. Otherwise it will sound dull and it will have a weak output.

The wrap around bridge does its job but it's somewhat uncomfortable. The saddles are a bit sharp and uncomfortable so I had to replace it. I thought it looked ugly too, but that's subjective.

When it comes to finish, I think Thomann web page is misleading. The guitar doesn't look anything like in the images on their web page. The images show a faded cherry guitar in a beautiful gloss finish, whereas the actual colour is a dull satin finish. It's not an open pore finish either as they list in the specs, so thumbs down for false advertising.

Overall, if you have luthier skills, you can make this guitar play as good as a guitar that costs much more. But if you don't, you will be underwhelmed and you have to spend quite a few $$$ on fretwork, nut replacement, pickup shims etc.

Bought this because I wanted a p90 guitar and didn’t have one.
Playability and sound-wise it’s more or less on par with a squire product (caution that pickup is quite noisy however). Quality wise… this was not well made.

It seems as though the fretboard is darkened with the use of a dye? They forgot to dye the bottom end of my fretboard and it looks comical. Doesn’t effect playability, but it does bother me. Intonation is sharp by about 5-7 cents on 12th fret even with saddles all the way back on E and G strings. Without the use of a tuner I don’t know that I could hear that? But again it bothers me.

This is my second Harley Benton product, the other was much better.
Sound wise it sounds just like a p90 should but there must be zero shielding because it’s very noisy.
Not upset enough to return, but wouldn’t buy again.