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what dobster said above seems quite helpful---he seems in a better position to give advice to someone just starting out than i am--but since i am interested in this, i'll tell what i think anyway.
my biais is toward piano--i started out playing it and it is still my primary instrument.
so i assume that 88 keys would be preferable for the range of possibilities they give you.
i find that weighted keys are preferable because they have more nuance in the action and because building strength in your hands would let you move into digital or acoustic more easily than using a digital keyboard up front, which would let you develop co-ordination but not strength.
i also have found that analog is preferable to digital because there is more room in the former for quirks.
i guess it depends upon how you think about the instrument.
i tend to think about them as individual instruments that have individual possibilities and part of the fun is finding them.
when i play electric, i usually use an old farfisa organ, which has all kinds of curious features (the keys for example are basically on/off switches, but there is alot of play at the threshold--the farfisa tends to associate lighter pressure with higher pitch, but those pitches are consistent once you find them--so with practice you can generate microtones by controlling the pressure you place on the keys--the emphasis is on lightness of touch and stability within that--if your hand shakes, you loose the pitch--so it is ulitmately about control)
i also like delay and distortion boxes in the electric format. acoustic, i do not need them--i play in an electric environment using acoustic piano without treatments and to hear it you would not be able to tell which instrument is producing which sound.
if you get a digital keybaord, all i can really say is try to think about it as a synthisizer as early in the game as you can and try to use that to move away from using presets and into building your own sounds. if you go this route, i would also check out early electronic music recordings all the way to get a sense of what options were being developed before folk started thinking about synths as copies of traditional instruments. you'll find that it is a very different approach to keyboards than treating them as surrogate pianos. digital keyboards give you many many possibilities but they also seem to come along with a way of thinking built around them that shuts these possibilities down. no need to give into it.
you might well be able to find keyboards on ebay for much less than you would find ina retail outlet, but to to that you would have to already know pretty much what you are looking for.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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