Jaccard Ceramic 3-Inch Peeling Knife

I've used plenty of ceramic knives before, although this is the first ceramic bird's beak (BB) and my first Jaccard. This knife is pretty bad. It has a number of problems:

(1) The ceramic blade isn't nearly as sharp as I'd expect remember, this is a brand-new factory blade purchased direct from Jaccard (via Amazon). The whole point of ceramic materials is that they hold their edge perfectly over time... well, this edge started out crappy so it is going to stay crappy. I find it very hard to cut into a fresh cherry tomato, where I can do this easily with my 20 year old $10 Henckels knife with old crappy steel that I've sharpened hundreds of times.

(2) The blade is a bit large for a BB. I measure it as 82mm from base to tip (linear, so add a bit for the true arc-length). My Henckels is 68mm, which is a much better size. To be clear, this has nothing to do with my hand size, or the handle size, or the combination of the two (both knives fit well in my hand, which is average sized). What sucks is that the blade itself is larger than lots of things you'd want to pare with it. FYI the Jaccard's maximum arc is 3.5mm and the Henckels is 4mm, so the Jaccard also has a pitifully wide radius of curvature.

(3) The ceramic blade is fairly thick stock (measured at the back, not at the blade edge), which is especially bad on a knife meant for fine-paring as it means there's a fair amount of pressure and drag when you're trying to slip the entire knife inside something being pared. My Jaccard is = 1.80mm, Henckels BB = 0.71mm. For reference my Wusthof Grand Prix I (not II) regular paring knife is = 1.24mm and a relatively even thickness, my Global 20cm chef's knife = 1.75mm and a slightly tapered material ("Japanese style" thin for a full size chef's knife) and an old Henckels 20cm heavy "German style" chef's knife (from the same set at the BB) is = 3.15mm (this material is very tapered so it has a very thick feeling spine). On the cutting edge the Henckels BB goes gradually down to 0.38mm, where the Jaccard has a wedge-grind about mid-way and still only gets down to 0.64mm near the sharpened grind. I think a good BB knife needs very thin and flat material, so this Jaccard doesn't seem great.

(4) The blade has a very inconsistent radius-of-curvature. This is going to be hard to see in my picture, but it basically *looks* like this knife was sharpened free-handed by an unskilled laborer. I'm fine with handmade products, assuming of coure the craftsman doing the hand-work is better at it than a machine, which clearly isn't the case here (or the machine has really bad tolerances). This may sound nit-picky, but when you're trying to make a precision cut in a piece of food by drawing the knife along it, even a fraction of a millimeter change in the curvature is very noticable and annoying. This particular point is the main one I'm citing with the company to try to get them to give me a new and better knife.Pros:

knife came with a custom-made sleeve

medium price *for ceramic* (as opposed to real expensive ones)

Cons:

#1 above

#2 above

#3 above

#4 above

#5 above

Unknowns:

I haven't had this long enough to know how well the ceramic holds up to chipping or staining.

This knife takes some getting use to as the blade seems to be on the wrong side. I am use to using the Bird's Beak blades.

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