I don't care much for etching and hate gold wash. Gold wash is just cheap gold plating that is short lived. Etching... it can be good, but is more often tacky than artistic, in my opinion. The frosty stuff is horrible and laser etching, so common among blademakers these days, is OK for production stuff, but I'm surprised so many custom knifemakers and such are using laser etching for their marks. It's easy and pretty inexpensive to farm out the etching but I think that takes something away from a quality blade. I've seen some hand etching done by masters that was absolutely incredible, though, and I may end up trying some this summer. It's just too hazardous to do indoors and it's a very tricky temperature sensivitive process but I'll admit the results are incredible with extraordinary depth and detail, so it is worth considering.

I was a little tempted to get one of the EZetch machines with stencils and stencil maker, but decided against it for aesthetic reasons.