Helpful Hints from joeeze: Best seafood scissors

Cook's Illustrated's "Equipment Corner" feature in the July & August issue — never "July/August" — had the following to say about seafood scissors:

Cutting open thick, hard seafood shells to extract the meat can be challenging, but seafood scissors promise to make the job easier. We tested two pairs against our favorite all-purpose Shun Classic Kitchen Shears ($49.95), snipping through pounds of lobster, king crab, and shrimp and lifting out the meat. The kitchen shears' thick, straight blades, though excellent for butterflying chicken and snipping herbs, were difficult to fit into narrow claws and legs and tended to hack up delicate meat in the process. The straight, bulky blades on the Original Sea Scissors ($14.95) shared the same problem, and their one innovation — a splatter-blocking shield — merely served to obstruct our view. The slim, curved Progressive International Seafood Scissors ($9.95; pictured above and below) were just right: sturdy enough to slice through a crab carapace, easily able to follow the arc of a shrimp shell or lobster tail, and thin enough to neatly extract meat from a lobster leg. These affordable shears saved time — and didn't waste one morsel of precious meat.

I am struck by how the majority of Cook's Illustrated's mano-a-mano product face-offs in recent months have resulted in the very cheapest item winning in terms of overall function.

In the kitchen space, if nowhere else, it seems you often don't get what you pay for: price has little relation to quality.

Most interesting, this.