Liquid Chromatography preference

[ChadBradford1]

Hi,
I was wondering what are you're favorit brands of instruments for Liquid Chromatography? What your experiences with different brands? I am asking because I might be switching.

Thanks

[AnaChem1983]

The manufacturers I've used most are Agilent, Shimadzu and Waters. I've dabbled with PerkinElmer but that was over 10 years ago now. The three mentioned are in the last 10 years.

Waters was certainly my least favourite. I found the set up unnecessarily fiddly whilst the software, Empower, was responsible for some dark moods in the lab! However, to offer some balance, it's only fair I say that out of the three mentioned Waters is the one I have used the least and so it could easily be a case of being more familiar with the other two.

The Shimadzu software, LabSolutions, is a little bit counterintuitive IMO, but then again you could probably say this about most CDS platforms.

If pushed I would probably still say Agilent but Shimadzu is catching up in terms of personal preference.

[TylerSmith123]

Hi Chad,

I've been a Shimadzu Prominence user for the past four years and my experience with them has been excellent. Over my time, my region has had a switch up that hasn't affected any communication or maintenance of my instruments even though I had been speaking to different groups of people. This touches on something important when it comes to deciding, the availability of their staff and the quality of service. If you cannot get someone to come out and install your instrument, or if you have an issue and need consulting, then picking a correct vendor can make all the difference. If you're in the US, you will likely have less of a problem, but all of the vendors make excellent instruments, so the most important thing to me is the service they provide answering user questions, performing timely maintenance, and providing us ways to improve our chromatography. Shimadzu has been very responsive and open to ignorant and complicated and multifaceted questions that can very certainly occur when conducting chromatography.

Hope this helps and good luck with your future separations,
Tyler