The diamond plates take some initial conditioning, don’t put your best and finest blade on it before the dullest junker has taken initial roughness off. The manufacturer recommends that too. Manufacturing process leaves plates with spots where grit is much coarser that nominal value tells, these chip off and plate becomes what the box says.

That said, my experience with DMT has been that on Fine plate I see wavy undulations on stone (visible when metal shaving colored the plate) but seems flat. Extra Fine is nice and works as advertised. Extra coarse is coarse and just don’t appear to eat metal that much after initial scratching. The XC plate is bald in one spot with few visible diamond particles embedded. I’m not quite sure what to think of it.

However the full Pauls sharpening process (XC -> F -> XF -> leather + autoglym polishing compound) gives me a workable edge that eats wood nicely. I’m new to woodworking and sharpening so it might be I’m doing something wrong with XC.