Is the AFMAT Electric Pencil Sharpener Worth It?
Worth it, with one size limit to know about
You know the sound: that grinding whine from a manual sharpener that just won't stop, right up until the lead snaps off inside the wood and you're left twisting a stub that's now shorter than your thumb. Or worse, a kid presses too hard, the point shears, and you're doing it all again. An electric pencil sharpener is supposed to fix that. The question is whether it actually knows when to quit.
Here's the trick: this one doesn't run until you tell it to stop, it runs until the pencil tells it to stop. Drop a pencil into the hole and the motor auto-feeds it against the blade. As the tip gets pointier, resistance and shape change, and the mechanism reads that and auto-ejects the pencil the moment it's sharp, before the motor keeps grinding away wood and lead you didn't need to lose. That's the whole flaw in old sharpeners solved in one move: no over-sharpening, no exposed blade for little fingers to find. You get three sharpness settings, so an artist can dial in a fine point for shading while a kid gets a blunter, sturdier tip that survives being pressed too hard. The barrel takes a wide range, 7 to 11.5mm, so it handles fat jumbo pencils and skinny colored ones like Prismacolor or Crayola without swapping tools. It's cordless too, charging in about two hours for roughly 600 sharpens, so it lives on a desk or goes in a backpack without hunting for an outlet.
You're not really buying a sharpener, you're buying a machine that decides for you when a pencil is done, which is the one job manual sharpeners always got wrong. Once it stops guessing, you stop wasting pencils and fingers along with them.
Worth it if
- You want kids sharpening pencils without touching a blade
- You use a mix of graphite and colored pencils in different sizes
- You want it to stop itself instead of babysitting it
Skip it if
- Your pencils are already shorter than about three inches
- You need a sharpener built for continuous, heavy classroom-wide use
- You mainly use soft-core pencils and don't want to adjust the tip setting
Not for very short pencil stubs or heavy-duty nonstop classroom sharpening loads.
If you've got kids, students, or colored pencils that keep snapping under a hand crank, this is a quiet yes. Skip it if you're working with pencils shorter than about three inches or need something built for constant industrial-volume sharpening, because that's the one spot this design draws a line.
Amazon shoppers rate it 4 out of 5 across 4,152 ratings. That is their number, not ours.
Before you go
Are electric pencil sharpeners worth it?
For anyone sharpening pencils daily, especially kids or artists, yes, because they stop wear and breakage that manual sharpeners cause when you oversharpen or apply uneven pressure.
How long does an AFMAT pencil sharpener take to charge?
About two hours for a full charge, which is rated for up to 600 uses before you need to plug it in again.
Why won't my AFMAT pencil sharpener work?
Usually it's a pencil shorter than 2.9 inches jamming the feed, or a battery that needs charging, since it won't run properly mid-charge without the recommended 5V 2A adapter.
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By the numbers
earn an unconditional yes at full priceOut of 46 office products we have reviewed. This one is a yes with a condition attached.
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Full spec sheet
| Brand | AFMAT |
|---|---|
| Power source | Rechargeable battery, cordless |
| Pencil diameter range | 7-11.5mm |
| Sharpness settings | Sharp, medium, blunt |
| Charge time | About 2 hours |
| Uses per charge | Up to 600 |
| Dimensions | 3.6 x 3.6 x 7.3 inches |
| Material | ABS housing, stainless steel blade |
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