Prismacolor Premier Pencil Sharpener

This sharpener is very good for being manual. Just one or two twists and your pencil is sharp again. The one I had took several and ate up a lot of the pencil before it was sharp again.It's solidly made and easy to hold.

works very well for my nice art pencils, love the tall and squat sharpening options!

When you use hundreds of Prisma Pencils, keeping them sharp is hard work. After a few years, you find yourself collecting pencil sharpeners, hoping to find THE one that makes it easy, that produces a fine point, that holds breakage to a minimum, that feels good in the hand, and other attributes as well.This sharpener meets all the above requirements. Let me describe why I like it:• It is large enough to fit in the hand so that you can hold it steady. A precise angle must be maintained, so a sharpener that is steady in the hand is half-way there before you even put the pencil in.• It has a ⅜ inch neck that grips pencils with close tolerance. This is the other half of getting that precise angle and maintaining it. As you turn the pencil, the neck holds the pencil steady and doesn't allow it to tilt in relation to the sharpener. I just checked a half-dozen pencil sharpeners whose necks were from 1/16 inch to ⅛ inch. They do not hold the pencil straight.• This sharpener produces two points; wide and narrow. If you are a pencil artist, you know when each type is more favorable. Most sharpeners do one or the other. usually it's the fat slope, whose point wears quickly, but otherwise lasts a long time. The fine point will do detail work for a little longer between sharpenings. I'm very glad to have both kinds.• It collects wood and core shavings. They stay inside. If you turn it over, you don't get colored grit on your hands, which then gets on your drawings. The lid keeps everything in, yet flips up instantly when needed.• Empties easily once you figure out how. How to remove the cap: the top ⅜" (or just under a half-inch with the cap snapped down) is the part that comes off. It looks like part of the body, but it is tapered so that you can push up on it with your thumbs, and it will come straight out. Do not twist! Do not pull on the cap. The cap will last a long time if you don't pull or twist it. So, just get your thumbs under that last half-inch (avoid the decorative "wrap" part) and push straight up.• Large enough to hold a lot of shavings, yet small enough to fit in most bags without having to reorganize.• Will not dump shavings in your drawing bag/satchel/pack/case/drawer.• Pencil shavings are not pretty to look at. The smoked color of the Prismacolor sharpener means you don't have to.• Stands easily on its circular base.• While it is round (cylindrical), it is weighted so as to resist rolling. On a flat-rubber surface, I had to tilt it beyond 8 degrees to cause it to roll (empty). That's a greater incline than any railroad grade, and more than all but the steepest of automobile grades. It'll give you a fighting chance to catch it before it rolls down the hill you're sitting on while drawing Mount Rushmore.About broken pencil leads in Prismacolors:A dull pencil sharpener, and/or one that does not hold the pencil at the same exact angle against the blade, can indeed break the lead before you've finished sharpening, but that is not the major cause of broken leads. Prismacolors are very soft. Drop a pencil, and even though the wood appears unbroken, the soft core "crayon" inside will shatter in as many as a dozen places. Trying to sharpen one of these is an exercise in futility, and you often have to wait until you get to the end of one before it stops breaking off inside the sharpener. This is not the fault of the sharpener, though as stated above, dull cutters and loose necks can cause most sharpeners to twist off a shattered core before THIS sharpener would do so. Generally, as long as these cutters are kept sharp, this sharpener will resist breaking the core of the pencil. It must be understood, however, that once a pencil has been dropped onto a hard surface, or bent, its core is shattered and no sharpener can prevent it from breaking. You can only hope to find a piece that's long enough to hold until sharpened, then strong enough to hold while you draw.To sum up: the broken cores inside a pencil get twisted out by a dull sharpener or one that cannot maintain a proper angle. While no sharpener can prevent your pencil cores from being broken internally, this one at least does its best not to exacerbate the problem. In short, don't blame the sharpener... up to a point.Ok, so it's a long review for one of the simplest and ordinary tools in our box. But the thing is, there are differences between pencil sharpeners. I have them all. I love some of my tiny, handy sharpeners that can go in a pocket, a pencil case, an Altoids box (along with several erasers and other tools), but they are all guilty of being messy and not holding a perfect angle. This Prismacolor sharpener may be a bit more bulky, but it is probably the best sharpener I've used on Prismacolor Pencils, for the reasons stated above. If it wears out quickly, then I'll take back my 5-star rating, but so far it deserves what I gave it.Shooshie

I've used a lot of manual pencil sharpeners for lots of pencil types but this one is by far my favorite. I find other sharpeners sometimes break the lead or chip at the wood rather than being a nice, clean point. This one does the job exactly perfect.

I think this is an amazing sharpener because it’s just the right thing for your color pencils and regular pencils. But I didn’t really like how portable it was because it’s kind of bulky and it’s also very expensive for being a sharpener. But from there on it was amazing and the color was also good.

this is an excellent sharpener. I do a lot of work with high end colored pencils and they can be difficult to find the right sharpener for but I've finally found the one! It even works great for my favorite Derwent pencils. I have 10 higher end hand held sharpeners and this one is the best by leaps and bounds . Just a heads up though, I had to watch a YouTube video on how to detach the shavings tank as the packaging has no instructions. The video has over 100,000 views so apparently a lot of purchaser find themselves in this predicament. So you can google to find the video or you can just close the top of the sharpener and then put your thumb on the small raised arrow on the front of it and push up and the lid should pop right off the tank.

Everyone that uses color pencils, needs this. Great value, does not destroy or chew up the pencil,and gets the lead sharp.

Works very well. Best sharpener I own. I did at one point drop it and now it's cracked and chipped. But it still works!