PriorityChef 2-Stage Sharpener vs. Longzon 4-Stage Sharpener Side-by-Side Comparison

Our blunt test knife emerged sharp and keen after 75 seconds of sharpening with the Priority Chef. In fact, it was sharp enough to slice through a lemon in one go after just 60 seconds on the Coarse stage; the extra 15 seconds served only to refine the edge and, consequently, the cut.

Your mileage may vary depending on the conditions of your knives and the hardness of their steel. However, in most cases, you won’t need more than 30 seconds to rejuvenate a dull knife to a serviceable level.

The Longzon sharpener was disappointing in this test: It took 190 seconds on average to sharpen a dull knife to the level where it can slice a lemon with ease. Three minutes doesn’t seem so long, but when you’re repeating a motion on a small device, it can feel like an eternity.

Unlike the case with the Mueller, the tungsten carbide blades on this device offer a tight and steady brace. For some reason unknown to us, the knife edge just didn’t get keen quickly enough with it.

Even after 6 minutes, our test knife needed two, sometimes three rather heavy swipes to cut through beef tendon. It had no trouble with chicken breast with runny skin and fat, though. Ripe tomatoes, similarly, were a piece of cake.

Since our Control knife was at sharpness Level 8 when brand new, we could say the Priority Chef sharpener can bring it back to factory sharpness after 6 minutes. Of course, you may see different results with knives that are made of particularly hard steel.

We doubled the time in the lemon-cutting test and the Longzon sharpener could only up the knife sharpness by one level. It cut through a ripe tomato effortlessly, and took two forceful swipes to sever the tough skin on a chicken breast. This isn’t a bad performance, per se, but we had expected more from the sharpener as it looks so well-made.

Unlike the V-shaped abrasive blades found on most other pull-through devices, the Priority Chef’s abrasive discs create short, nearly vertical grooves along the edge — and the ceramic fine stage didn’t do much to refine them. We also detected chips and burrs — albeit very small ones — where the edge is narrowest. That suggested that the sharpening discs do not directly contact that part.

That being said, the Priority Chef still created a much finer edge than did its other disc-based cousin, the Chef’s Choice 4643. The Chef’s Choice created a secondary edge, but it left the primary edge completely untouched.

We couldn’t be more impressed when we saw the knife edge after sharpening with the Longzon. It’s smooth, shiny, and balanced between the two sides — common among electric sharpeners, but a rare thing to see with manual pull-through devices. We can’t quite explain the lack of chips, grains, or unfinished shavings — we didn’t need a magnifier to see them on the edge produced by its identical cousin, the Mueller. 

At any rate, if a clean, perfect edge is what you’re after in a handheld sharpener, the Longzon should be among your top choices.

For the speed and level of sharpness it can achieve, we were impressed by how little material the Priority Chef removed from the knife after one minute of sharpening. The only debris was dust and tiny chips rather than long curls of swarf, like some others. The device seems to only shave off what’s really necessary to make the edge sharp.

On most devices that employ tungsten carbide blades as the sharpening ‘abrasive’, the more material they remove, the quicker they work and the sharper the edge. The Longzon is not an exception. It took more than 3 minutes to produce a keen edge, so it’s not a complete surprise that it only removed a moderate amount of material from the edge in 1 minute.