Yamaha does make very good budget guitars....with one caveat:

With the exception of their Japanese-made models (e.g. 26/36 models from the L series, high-end Compass, etc.) every other steel-string Yamaha I've seen had a bad neck angle. For those unfamiliar the term, no, I am not talking about neck relief, which can be easily adjusted via the truss rod. A bad neck angle is much more serious and permanent. More specifics at frets.com:

Neck Angle at Frets.com

In short, what this means is that it will be difficult to adjust the guitar action to a suitably low height for more advanced playing (especially fingerstyle) without sacrificing tone. Even their mid-range models (I have a RM2800 LL16) suffer from the same problem, although they sound and play great.

My advice to you (and anyone else who's new to acoustic guitars) is to keep neck angle in mind when shopping for instruments. Playability makes a huge difference in your advancement as a guitarist. If possible, get a guitar which sounds good and has a healthy neck angle, although this may not be easy to do in Malaysia since our choices are very limited

I highly doubt that, unless it's a used instrument or you got a fantastic deal!

It should be around RM900 or more. Here's the US price for reference:

Yamaha APX500

This post has been edited by mmmaak: Feb 12 2009, 11:42 PM