Manual or hand mills are great when you need a small amount of ground coffee and want or need to avoid the whirl of an electric motor.

The differences in hand mills mostly lie in how you hold the mill, and how you load the beans into the mill and remove the ground coffee. How you hold the mill matters because there is some resistance - more resistance as you use a finer setting - and you need to have a good grip on it.

For example, the Zassenhaus Turkish mill is harder to hold I think since it is so small - the Zassenhaus knee mills are nice because they are more narrow and a bit easier to hold. The Hario Skerton mills use ceramic burs; the Zassenhaus mills all use hardened steel. Sweetmarias has a grinder comparison chart that might be helpful as it goes over some highlights and key details of all the mills we sell.