I live in a fairly small condo with a small kitchen and many cooking and baking mixers, blenders, and so on competing for room. As a result counter-space is too dear for a large electric grinder and I've had a manual daily grind of 50 to 100 grams for the past eight or so years.
For most of those eight years I've used a Hario Sketron. It worked, it's relatively inexpensive, and that's what I've got to say about that. I eventually found myself wanting a replacement and with the spending money to find one. My principle goal was to get something faster. I never clocked it (and I've since given away the Hario), but it took me a couple minutes to grind up my beans for an Aeropress. Call it 120 seconds for 25 grams. A 50 gram dose for the Chemex was doable, but a chore.
So; what are the options for someone who can blow ~200-300$ on a grinder but not the 500k$ for a bigger kitchen?
Perhaps unsurprisingly there are a variety of options available on the premium manual grinder market. I went with the Comandante since it is small and reviews claimed it to be fast.
It is small. Not particularly light; there is some plastic but it's a lot of metal, coming in a little heavier than the larger but principally ceramic-plastic-and-glass Hario.
Fast is harder to nail down since the amount of time it takes to grind X grams largely depends on the roast and desired fineness. For me, a 25g dose of light roast for the Aeropress (20 clicks) takes 58 seconds. This is fast enough I can start the electric kettle and be done grinding before the water is ready. The handle is also easier to crank than the Hario (despite being shorter), which is nice in itself and may partially explain how I can get through the beans faster.
So; it's small and fast. Somewhat unexpectedly it also makes better coffee. The manufacturer obviously markets the device as producing better coffee, but I didn't think it would make a noticable difference. Certainly the size of the grounds are significantly more consistent from the Comandante than the Hario. The manufacturer claims the consistency of the grind affects extraction rates favorably, which makes some sense. It's possible that, like the audiophile who paid for pure silver Ethernet cables, the difference is more in my head than the outside world, but I really don't think so.
While we're on the positive notes, the Comandante has a nice comfortable handle and the geometry works well (I have large hands and the handle clears them, I used to occasionally catch a knuckle with the Hario – it never hurt but it was annoying)
I do have some nits and some workarounds:
First, the Comandante hopper is small for the 50g I use for my Chemex. You can just get 50g of light roast coffee in there (if you pile it a little), but darker roasts are less dense and I can get 40g at best. Work around is to just use both the jars the grinder comes with. Filling the Comandante from its bean jars is quick (a 20 second youtube video demonstration for a 1 second act); I zero a scale with both jars on it and fill them at the same time so the operation is math free, dump one in, screw it on and grind into it, dump the other in, screw on and grind. It's a little slower than a single large hopper would be, but not that much.
Second issue is that there is a recess where the crank handle connects to the drive shaft of the grinder. To fill the grinder you need to remove the handle and sometimes during the fill a bean will fall in that recess and you can't put the grinder back together until the bean is out. It doesn't happen all that often, and you can reduce your chances if you don't overload the grinder and give a little swirl as you fill, but there doesn't seem to be a way to entirely avoid the possibility. Work around is to hold the grinder in one hand and wack the top of the grinder with your open palm[0] and usually the bean pops out.
Anyway; this works for me. I am curious to try out some other manual grinders. My co-worker has a Lido grinder and in normal time's I'd have him bring it to the office so we could swap for a day or two and compare (the Lido is too tall for my cabinet so I didn't look too closely at it; my co-worker on the other hand wanted continually adjustable grind for his espresso). Perhapse someday yet that'll happen.
[0]: another tip I picked up from Youtube, but I can't find the video right now.