The problem with wanting the DSLR of cookware is there's nothing that really fits that bill. In cookware, highly automated technology tends to be esoteric; versatile equipment tends to rely on your skills. I'd suggest that you go the versatile route and resign yourself to slowly building up those skills. Maybe a Weber charcoal grill - you can do damn near anything with one if you're good enough. On to knives... There are a number of cheap options that are quite good. The Victorinox have been mentioned often and are quite. Kiwi brand knives sharpen extremely well, though they don't come in classical chef knife shapes. Rada knives are quite cheap and sharpen very well. Mercer and Mundial both offer German style blades that are on par with the quality of old standbys like Wusthof Classics but cost a third of the price. Or if you look just a little higher, you can find knives like the Tojiro DP and the CCK Chinese Cleaver for under $100, which are not merely great cheap knives but great knives in general. Even more important than the knife is that you have some way to sharpen it. A dull knife is useless. If you want to go the professional sharpening route, a steel or ceramic honing rod would be a good idea. If you might be interested in sharpening at home, you might want to look into different sharpeners before you buy a knife to make sure that whatever you buy is appropriate for your sharpening solution. I could tell you more about home sharpening systems if you're interested. They're relatively easy to sharpen. They're unlikely to chip or snap if used to cut chicken bones, but the edge can warp a bit and will definitely wind up a little duller for the effort. You could probably manage to chop through some pork bones, but it would be better to just buy a meat cleaver - there are some cheap ones on the market that will mow through pork bones. Cutting along but not into either kind of bone will cause some dulling (like any knife) but shouldn't cause any other problems. As for how often to sharpen - depends on how you use them and how you sharpen em. Victorinox are fairly comparable to German knives like Wusthof in terms of edge retention, but not to the level of most Japanese knives. How often you need to sharpen depends a lot on usage - so a home cook might be fine sharpening only once a year while a line cook in a busy kitchen might find a victorinox gets dull every week or so. But it also depends on your particular definition of whOat's sharp enough. You can keep an extremely fine edge by avoiding a steel entirely and touching up often with a medium or fine grit whetstone - using the whetstone almost like a steel, for day to day maintenance. Or, OTOH, you might feel more comfortable getting only the rare professional sharpening done and using either a steel or a coarse ceramic 'honing' rod to keep the edge kindof jagged, which helps it rip into food. Two different people don't necessarily have the same definition of sharp. From a functional standpoint, it's probably most important that a knife is sharp enough to allow you to use good, efficient cutting technique. That threshold is somewhere around the point at which a knife cuts easily through a ripe tomato without sawing or squishing. Everything beyond that depends on preference.
