Have you ever heard of it?

Spyderco is using it. They advertisise it as saltwater proof (by using nitrogen instead of carbon for hardening properties) and still holding a high grade edge.

Opinions or experiences?

There's got to be something more than what they are saying. I have never heard of replacing carbon with nitrogen for hardening. I don't believe it is possible since carbon is one of the elements used for hardening steel and nitrogen is a gas and plays no part in steel hardening. To my knowledge.

The bladeforums guys love it, I can not find a spec sheet on it - sorry.

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I can not find a spec sheet on it

Per the Spyderco metal comparison chart, in percent:

Carbon, 0.15
Chromium, 14-16
Manganese, 2
Moly, 0.5-1.5
Nickel, 6-8
Nitrogen, 0.1
Phosphorus, 0.04
Silicon, 3-4.5
Sulfur, 0.03
Hardness, Rc 57-58

It is a Precipitation hardened Steel, FWIW...

It's spelled CHEAP ! It is a new steel developed for cheap knives.The steel comes from the mill already hardened and the knife maker just grinds it to shape.So it's soft enough to be easily ground and polished and provides a servicible [???] knife for low cost.

I'll bet it isn't cheap ... not with all that nickel in it.

Probably won't hold the kind of edge that is expected of a fine knife. Has two little carbon and vanadium for me to expect it to be an edge holder.

Seems to be aimed at corrosion resistance. Lots of dive knife makers using it.

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It's spelled CHEAP

It's *only* an ~$80 knife...with a ~3" blade Not exactly an entry level blade in my world.

Benchmade used it for a while too, in their dive knives, before changing to X15TN (.21 N, BTW, and CPM-S30V has .20%N)...again not exactly an entry level blade maker.

I figured that it either traded off edge quality (can't live with that) or ease of sharpening (I have the patience for that)...but couldn't tell which.

S30V isn't remotely comparable. That has 1.40 C and 4.0 Va in it ... makes for pretty sharp knives!

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S30V isn't remotely comparable

Agreed...I was just pointing out that using nitrogen as an alloying agent is not exclusive to this H-1 I was researching...so there might be something to it...but might not as most things are tradeoffs and I am not enough of a metallurgist to know the difference!