****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
I am an avid home cook and knife collector, and I've been on a quest for the ideal way to sharpen up my kitchen knives for quite some time now, experimenting with various manual sharpeners, honing steels, Japanese waterstones, and the like. I finally decided that this particular Chef's Choice 220 had the best price-to-performance ratio of the models listed, and for the price, I really couldn't go wrong. The unit is fairly small and compact, and stows away nicely when not in use. I brought out a few of my cheaper knives to test the machine out with, as I've read about some electric sharpeners not doing such a great job, and some even leaving very visible scratch marks on the sides of the knives when they are done.I turned on the unit and was further pleased to hear that it only generated a quiet hum, as opposed to reports of other louder grinding machines. I first tried to sharpen a very inexpensive santoku knife about 10 times through each side of the two 20-degree angled sharpening slots. The grinding sound is perfectly acceptable - in fact, much less noisy than even my coffee grinder. I then proceeded to do 20 back-and-forth passes through the manual sharpener to the side. As a first test, I ran my finger along the blade edge to feel for any nicks and burrs, and surprisingly I managed to cut myself - twice! This machine does some serious sharpening in a very short amount of time! I then proceeded to do the "paper test", and the "tomato test". My cheap Oster kitchen knife performed incredibly, carving up thin ribbons of paper like a samurai sword, and producing fine, translucent slices of tomato with great ease. After sharpening it at an even finer angle (there is some degree of mobility in each slot, to accommodate different sizes of knives), I was able to do the "palm shavings test" (which I don't recommend, but anyway), where there was a very fine dust coming off my palms when rubbed on them at a tight angle, like a razor blade. Do this very carefully!The only drawbacks I can see to this unit are that it only sharpens to the Western standard 20 degree blade angle, and it will not sharpen Japanese deba style knives or other specialty knives. Chef's Choice does make higher end models that sharpen those. For the price, I don't see this as much of a disadvantage. In short, I am incredibly pleased with the results that this little machine produced with such little effort, compared to the great lengths of time I've spent with manual methods. Highly recommended for home cooks as well as professional chefs!
