I often sharpen my pencils with a blade but been finding recently a lot of pain in my thumb doing this, I was looking for a solution and came upon this sharpener. It doesn't really 'plane' the wood it just kind of digs in to the wood, kind of like the blade isn't strong enough cut through. I looked up some YouTube videos to see how to use it correctly incase I was doing it wrong. I found a number of positive reviews by people who had been given the sharpener for free and a number of reviews by people who paid for it themselves, and their reviews were not as positive and they were having the same uses I was having. If you have an hour to sharpen 1 pencil by only taking of very very small pieces of wood off at a time this might be for you but you likely won't get the as good as a result as if you just used a normal blade or even a long tip pencil sharpener. Also to note the pencil scuffs up the sharpener immediately, so the bottom won't stay nice, so if you expect to pay this much money and have the sharpener still looking nice, just be aware the bottom won't, it will have a lot of scuff marks. I tried to rub them off but they wouldn't come off, maybe if you used an electric buffer you could get it back to looking nice but I'm not going to spend even more time with this sharpener, just to scuff it up again with the next pencil. The quality is there the materials don't feel cheap, it has a nice weight, and it looks really nice, it just dosen't work very well. I should have looked up reviews first as this is an expensive paper weight for my desk now as I've just gone back to using my trusty blade.