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Trying to buy a knife recently there are some that are $10, some $50 and all the way up to $300+. I understand that there are differences in the quality of the steel and its hardness and how long it holds its edge for. However there isn't a clear difference in features at the different price points apart from I assume more expensive works better somehow.

For the non-specialist, by which I mean someone like me who cooks daily and would like a good tool but doesn't care about the marginal gains, what is the right level to buy?

  • I'm assuming like a lot of things there's an 80/20 principle where you get 80% of the benefits after a certain expenditure and then next few hundred bucks are squeezing out the last few percent
Tom
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    Voted to reopen. This is a very different question than the one you link to, @rumtscho. That one is *only* about hardness, this one is about general quality. That said, it's possible this question should be closed as "opinion-based", given. – FuzzyChef May 04 '21 at 21:28
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    I can see there's potentially a subjective element in the answers, but the question is definitely different from the posted duplicate - this is about what criteria are important in a knife generally and where cost starts to outweigh gain. – Tom May 05 '21 at 11:32
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    @FuzzyChef thank you for pointing that out, I had misread the question as focusing on hardness. Tom, we do have a question on the general "what criteria to look for", so I exchanged the duplicate target. The price discussion is not really answerable - to the extent that there is a correlation between price and quality (and it may not be as strong as you seem to think), choosing an optimal point is very subjective. One person's "marginal gains" are another person's must-haves. – rumtscho May 05 '21 at 14:08
  • Hmmm ... there's no way to revoke my reopen flag. – FuzzyChef May 05 '21 at 19:12
  • Example: many folks (including ATK) love the Victorinox stamped-blade chef knife, which is about 40% of the cost of competing knives by, say, Wustof. However, some people find the lighter weight and flex of the Victorinox intolerable, wheras others kinda like it. It's very much a matter of opinion. – FuzzyChef May 05 '21 at 19:15
  • Fair enough @FuzzyChef - I see it's not a good fit – Tom May 06 '21 at 08:00
  • Yeah, sorry. You really want somewhere you can have a discussion, and SA isn't that place. – FuzzyChef May 06 '21 at 17:19

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