Features:

  • Sharpens your Prismacolor colored pencils to a perfect point
  • Two different blades, both made from high quality sharpened steel
  • Select a wide point for coverage or a fine point for sharp details
  • Translucent black body allows you to see exactly when the sharpener is full
  • Specifically designed for Prismacolor Premier pencils
Highly recommended!!!!!! 😀😀😀😀😀

Item arrived on time and undamaged. I've done a careful in depth comparison of a few handheld pencil sharpeners which include single and double hole silver with compartment for shavings and without, a few different store brands all with compartments to hold shavings, Prismacolor oval sharpener, and this Prismacolor design. The breakdown is this: 1. While the single and double hole silver without shavings compartment are very sharp so you will have less breakage, they are quite small and a little hard to hold on to. 2. The store brand with single hole and shaving compartment albeit are nice to not have to be standing over a trash can, but not very sharp and there is more lead breakage. 3. The prismacolor oval is a nice design concept, but the plastic feels low grade and must have a larger hand to hold it steady to use due to it's length, resulting in more lead breakage. The shaving compartment does not hold very much. 4. This design is well designed and well constructed in all ways. The choice of being able to sharpen a more pointed length for harder lead cores and detail work is very nice. The option for a more shallow for better lack of term for softer cores is very nice as well. The flip top safety feature is wonderful. (No more accidental cuts on finger tips) The plastic used seems very sturdy and will hold up for a long. Overall if you've been going thru countless handheld sharpeners trying to find the perfect one, this is it hands down. Well constructed and designed in all manners, and is offered at a fair price. Highly recommend. ( I have not received anything from the company or Amazon for this review. Am just a passionate artist who takes great care of her art implements.)

DOES NOT fall apart when I use it, DOES NOT break all my pencils - it's a great product. Ignore the whiners/cry-babies.

After reading the reviews here I almost didn't purchase this sharpener. I went on to look at other sharpeners instead but found more of the same in regard to negative reviews. So I came back to this one, and it arrived this morning. It's great! Let's address those 1 star reviews: In regard to build/construction quality - I'm sorry, but it's not the manufacturer's fault that you're a ham-fisted oaf. I'm a big guy with very large hands and sometimes have troubles with small &/or delicate objects. No problems with this though. Opened easily, closes well and stays shut. Easy to empty too. I've sharpened about 15 pencils with it today - & NO BROKEN CORES! Which brings us to the "it breaks the leads" complainers. Yes, if you jam a pencil into the hole and start cranking away at it you're definitely going to get broken pigment cores with torn up wood. Learn how to sharpen a pencil (see previous ham-fisted oaf comment). Remove the pencil from your dominant hand, place it in your non-dominant hand and grip it firmly with the pointy end toward your dominant hand. Use your dominant hand to hold the sharpener with its open end (the end with the holes in it!) and gently )yet firmly) place the pencil in the sharpener. While holding the pencil steady gently rotate the sharpener instead of twisting the pencil. Don't forget to apply a bit of pressure on the sharpener (toward the pencil!). Watch as pretty long curls of wood appear in the chamber. Remove pencil to find it is now even more pointy than before! ........ Man, what a condescending jerk, eh? Seriously, it seems it's much easier to just point fingers and lay blame than it is to have a little patience &/or accept accountability for your own failings. Would I recommend this item? Absolutely. (I'd also recommend buying some better quality pencils too). Would I buy it again? The only reason I can think of that I would need to is that it will probably be more of a pain in the neck (and possibly ridiculously expensive) to track down replacement blades when these eventually get dull than it would be to simply buy a new sharpener - so yes, I would. Only real complaint? Pencils come out almost too sharp - but really that's on me. 100% user error.

Love this sharpener

Love this sharpener. It gets my pencils super sharp so I can really get small areas. There's two types of tips this sharpener can achieve and I've attached a few photos so you can see the difference between the green and gold. I have not had any breakage issues either.

Pay the few extra dollars and get these

I have eight or ten collections of pencils that my OCD has propelled me into buying, my 150-pencil collection of Prismacolor pencils being the best. Before I bought them, I read here on Amazon that with such an investment, the only pencil sharpener that should ever be used for Prismacolors is the Prismacolor brand. I have taken that advice to heart and, despite widespread complaints about the fragility and proneness to damage of Prismacolor pencils, I have had no injuries to ANY pencil, in ANY of my collections, from this pencil sharpener. I am thrilled with that outcome and would urge any prospective buyer of pencil sharpeners (especially for use with pencils in adult coloring books) to spring for the few extra dollars involved in buying this brand. In all candor, though, I think that the lack of damage to my pencils has something to do with not rolling over them with my wheel chair . . . .

Nice and Effective Manual Pencil Sharpener

I believe this is a good pencil sharpener for the price, and it sharpens my Prismacolors very well. As a general rule, I prefer manual pencil sharpeners that have a small compartment to hold the shavings. The blades were sharp, and I could tell by the long and even shavings I got when I sharpened my colored pencils. I just recently purchased this sharpener, so I cannot testify to how long the blades will maintain their sharpness. It is a small compartment to hold the pencil shavings so don't expect to sharpen more than 6 or 7 pencils before having to empty it. Also, it is plastic but I have not had any issues with breakage up to this point. I notice a couple of reviewers mentioning breakage of the leads in their pencils. To my knowledge, and experience, Prismacolors (only colored pencils I have used) are wax based and extremely fragile. You can drop one and literally break the lead inside. When I have a lead break, I place the pencil in the sun for a few minutes (it's wax and will melt) so the lead can adhere back together again. If you keep having lead breaks the pencil just may be defective, but again they are fragile. I also sharpen my pencils by twisting the sharpener, and not the pencil. Not that anyone needed my thoughts or advice on color-pencil lead breakage; but, I just thought I would throw that out there for anyone who wanted to know.

A great all around pencil

First of all these pencils are not black at all and all closer to a 3B or 4B pencil. With that being said though I was looking for a pencil that had the darkness while having that pencil look and not the look a colored pencil gives and these fit that perfectly. They can achieve the lightest tones all the way up to about a 4B pencil. So this is a good all around pencil to have since it can make almost any tone except the darker ones. It has soft lead and can blend, write, and of course smudge quite easily. It sharpens to a nice and sharp point very easily without the lead breaking or anything. The pencils do not come sharpened either. They are comfortable to draw with for long amounts of time and overall are just great. * In the photo these ebony pencils are on the top, in the middle is a black colored pencil, and the bottom is your everyday HB pencil.

These ebony pencils are wonderful. The color of the lead looks the same ...

These ebony pencils are wonderful. The color of the lead looks the same as the color of the external body in the image. They sharpened well and without breakage. I sharpened four of the pencils with different sharpeners: electric and three different handhelds. They all resulted in clean, crisp points. Using various pressure I can create a wonderful array of shades from light grey to a rich, bold black. I added images (look on the product page just above the right side column of Reviews) to show a comparison of the rich black versus the black of the Pigma Micron Pen as well as various shading applied on sketch paper. The box came with 12 pencils all in new and unbroken conditions. I have had nothing but a wonderful experience with these. I sent a box to a friend of mine and he loves them too! I highly recommend these graphite pencils.

Excellent Pencil Sharpener for Prisma Pencils. Here's why:

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

Grandma approved.

This is the ONLY sharpener I have ever used that did not eat up my pencils. I don't know what it is with me and pencil sharpeners (same thing happens with my makeup pencil sharpeners), but either it does not sharpen at all, or, it sharpens it to the point of breaking off, OR, it just eats the whole pencil up. I just started coloring for relaxation and the designs I use are to intricate for crayons. So I bought three sets of colored pencils. All of them sharpen very nicely with this sharpener. It is easy to use. Easy to empty. It has a lid on top (though I see to real purpose for that), but I guess if you carry it in a bag or purse it would help keep the shavings from falling out. I probably will not ever buy another sharpener. I will stick with this one as long as they make them.

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