Harley Benton SC-500 BK Vintage Series

I'm a beginner and only started playing a few months ago. I owned 2 acoustics prior to buying this guitar and wanted to give electric a go without spending too much money.
Here are my pros and cons (from a beginners perspective)
Pros:

Looks
The guitar is absolutely gorgeous and that seems to be a common theme with all Harley Benton guitars. the finish on the guitar is truly flawless. no nicks, no uneven texture anywhere. The inlays (while likely plastic, couldn't find any info) look like genuine mother of pearl inlays and really catch the eye, especially the headstock decal which has a lovely rainbow pattern to it on my model which adds a lot of character. The gold hardware on this model isn't painted, its plated in something (couldn't say what, not gold). Aesthetically the guitar really works for me and seriously looks like a guitar that's 4x what this guitar costs.

Price:
The price is a very obvious pro as these guitars are pretty much bottom of the line as far as price goes especially if you want a Les paul/single cut style. the other option in this price range is something like the Epiphone SL, and personally I think that guitars finish and look is just not comparable. an Epiphone is a budget guitar and you can tell but this one looks very premium. It also has very small details which they could have easily skipped, such as the binding being triple ply, the attention to detail is phenomenal.

Quality control
My guitar came with a sticker on the headstock showing it had been individually quality control checked as well as a card (i dont remember where it could have been on the stock tag) stating the name of the person who checked it. This level of quality control is unheard of in guitars this price range. hell, even in guitars that are 4x more expensive than this you rarely get quality control that's as strict as Harley Benton is


Playability:
As I stated, I'm a beginner, so I cant really speak to its performance against much more expensive models like Gibson's etc. As I haven't played one. I can however talk to its performance VS a cheap strat clone as my sister owns one I had a chance to play. the Harley Benton is worlds above that specific guitar. The neck on this guitar fits my hand wonderfully.

Fit and finish:
This guitar is wonderfully put together. the neck is a set neck and the base is wonderfully rounder so you can get to high frets comfortably. speaking of frets, this guitar has some really good fret work to it. each fret is polished fantastically and there is no "dragging" or scratching noises when I'm doing bends or anything similar, there doesn't seem to be any high points and if they are they are unnoticeable. this may be my specific version only but I'm impressed.

Hardware
im a beginner so i don't know the difference really between types of pickups, bridges etc. from over reviews I've seen that the pickups leave something to be desired. however from my perspective it plays fantastically. im sure really expensive pickups would improve the sound but to my ears the guitar sounds beautiful without doing anything to it, so i see no reason to change the pickups.

Cons:

Strings
The strings are very cheap but surprisingly playable. id barely call this a con to be honest as the strings are replicable. you can get top of the line strings for less than £10 so again. This is not a critique. hell it could have come without strings all together and I still wouldn't take overall points off for that.

Weight
mines a little on the heavy side (around 5 or so kg) but then again I'm used to acoustics and I've never had another les Paul style to compare it to, that weight may be normal.

Conclusion
If this is your first electric I can absolutely 100% recommend it. If you already have a few guitars you may be better off getting one of Harley Benton's more premium models. but over all this guitar is a 10/10 for quality especially in the price range, I cant really find anything bad to say about it.

Hello.
Yes, this is a wonderful guitar (examples of sounds below).
Delivery to Russia is super, I was very worried that the guitar would not arrive, or it would arrive with damage (due to the war, this is not relevant now)...
I have not played for a long time, my old guitar was made from a bass guitar (cut off the neck and re-glued))
I can't professionally give a decision on the sound ... on the quality of performance - 100 out of 100 ...

special thanks (many thanks) to Svitlana Brukhlii, the manager who worked with my order.

if, in some fantastic way, I win something, transfer the winnings to support the red cross.

SORRY(

all my music is here (updated)
https://disk.yandex.ru/d/VkRRtJ2YUdlHeA

I play mostly at home, so it more than ticked all the boxes needed. However, even if I did play a gig, I wouldn't mind taking this baby for a spin (along with a good enough amp).

This was the my first Thomann order and I didn't know what to expect. I was pleasently surprised with the guitar, no scratches whatsoever. The black gloss finish looks and feels fantastic. I took the pickguard off, but that was a personal preference, the pickguard was in good condition. The package arrived even before the time indicated by the UPS tracking number, another nice surpise (4 working days from Germany to Croatia). I believe I read comments about it being too heavy. It's lighter than my Squier Standard so there's a comparison if someone owns one. Definitely not a con for me.

The setup right from the box was great, just that the low E and A strings tended to resonate a bit more while playing unplugged, but a bit of tweaking should do the trick with that. Through the amp it has no string-resonating issues at all (Ibanez Tone Blaster 15r). It did, however have some feedback when facing the amp with higher gain.

The vintage style stock humbuckers sound good (I'm used to single coils so can't really compare them to other humbuckers, they are certainly "darker" than single coils).

The fretboard is a tad dry, probably down to the blackwood used. It's easily rectified with some fretboard oil, but it does not impede playability, as far as my limited skills are concerned.

The DLX machine heads keep tune and are very responsive and the gold hardware against the black body looks very elegant and really gives it that vintage feel.


A nice addition was the "In case of emergency rescue my guitars" sticker.

This will probably not be my last order from Thomann, hopefully the next one will be another success.

p.s. Even if someone were to stop playing guitar (why would you, though?) it would look great hanging on a wall in the middle of the room, admired by everyone!