Don’t know about Amazon – I assume they’re fine as far as service. I’ve used Sweetwater (famous for excellent customer service – I don’t know if they still throw some wrapped candies in their shipping boxes), Zzounds (also great – I think they might be out of business), and Guitar Center (in person only – eh, you got to grind them down on price and there’s always a bunch of little wannabe DeeJays blasting crap through some synth in the keys room).
Don’t have any knowledge of the Roland but I have heard amazing things about the Yamaha CP series – clearly Yamaha has the ability to produce awesome EP sounds, and maybe they started putting in their “piano” stuff that same technology. I’ve heard of a lot of high-end pros, like name players, using the Yamaha CPxs, but those are jazz guys who just use acoustic piano sounds. I’d bet the EP is good and the Hammond might be good enough for just the basic presets (they’re probably named things like “Jimmy” and “Groove” and “Booker T”).
If the Hammond is failing when I started playing professionally – not full-time, but for money when I was in grad school I used the P-80 with a Voce MicroBII (I think it was called). You can probably get one of those for almost nothing now. It’s a cheap, old module that sounded plenty good enough. (Although obligatory note now that I’ve been playing Hammond a lot in the past three or four years, you really can’t do all those cool Hammond things with weighted keys. But sure you can lean on some chords).
But serious note about the Hammond sounds – you NEED, as in not optional, the ability to use a “swell” pedal (an expression pedal). I use a Yamaha FC-7 – they’re about forty bucks, and work good, but your keyboard NEEDS to have an input for that kind of thing. Hammond just does not sound like it should without it. Learning to use it properly is harder IMO than kicking/tapping bass on pedals with left foot, but it just won’t sound right without the expression pedal ability.
