Does anyone use a silent violin for practice and if so with what results?

How does it compare with playing an acoustic instrument?

The main differences are that they are heavier and also feel 'dead'. Sound wise it depends greatly on the pickup.
Yamaha ones I have tried sounded ok and some were very good, but the really cheap types you see advertised on ebay have been awful.

Viohazard tries them every year at the stringed instrument fair here in Japan, and they keep getting better. He hasn't seen anything he likes better than the newer model Yamaha silent violins (150, 200 , 250). I know there are a lot of very average silent violins around, but there may also be some good ones that we never see in Japan too.

I haven't seen any under ?700. Those I have seen are between ?700 and ?1200. Are they the cheap ones or the more expensive?

The expensive ones...there is a clear difference between the first generation and the newer ones, and the newer ones were lighter and more comfortable too. Official retail prices in Japan are:
130 JYE 75600
150 JYE 120750
250 JYE 157700
255 JYE 173750

We didn't go this year, but from memory, the 250 and 255 were the clear winners (and teh 150 was OK??? Can't quite remember).

So that's about ?600 upwards so same sort of price range. The 250 is available for about ?1300.

Do you think a 5 stringed one would be better than a 4 or too confusing if swapping between the electric and acoustic?

The 250 is meant to be quite light.

Ha! The million dollar question! Viohazard spent a considerable amount of time asking himself that very question, totally hypothetical though.

Viohazard really is an ears boy, so he had no trouble playing the 5-string "for fun", but I don't know what it would be like if you were using it to polish your solo Bach for an audition that would be performed on your standard instrument though.

When I bought my 5-string a few years ago, I thought seriously about which violin was going to be my "main" instrument. What I found with the 5-string is that the strings are not quite where one expects to find them on the average 4-string, but that is something to which one can adjust quite quickly, with plenty of playing. The other problem with the extra string is that in higher positions, the strings either side of the stopped string sound, because they are that much closer together. That answered the question really, and I keep my 5-string for fun and playing traditional music in workshops or pub sessions.

Edit: I should add that this is not the "silent" type!

I'm really interested in this; I've noticed that since I've moved up a grade of violin or 3, I'm not happy with the sound that my pickup generates. I play a few times a year with the band, and when we get our string quartet ready we will need to amplify for that too.

When I was just playing in the folk/rock band the top end didn't matter, but now I'm doing more classical it's becoming important to me.

I have always maintained that if I bought an electric it would be a 5 string, and a good one....but how good is the sound?? I'm now actually tempted to move away from my 25 year old fishman pickup and try something new...even a mic. I really don't know what the best solution is.

You would really need to play one (somewhere quiet) yourself to know! Viohazard was at a fair, so it was incredibly noisy, even with earphones.