Chromatography Forum

Time for a new fluorescence detector, the old Waters 470 has gone to the happy detecting ground.

I am thinking of a new Linear unit. It gets sold under the Lab Alliance name these days, the Ultrafluor. I believe Thermo sells their version of it as well, a Finnigan.

However, I am not sure if a new unit is worth the expense.

Anyone have experience with the Linear unit?

Is it worth taking a chance on a used unit?

Suggestions?

Evan L. Cooper, Ph.D.

Greetings,

Well, I am not sure what no responses means here, but I thought I would follow-up anyway.

We decided to go with the Jasco unit, FP-2020. It is reasonably priced, and still has the analog outputs and contact closures standard. They have been making them for years. Apparently, they used to manufacture Waters fluorescence detectors for many years.

We had to drop the plans to buy the Lab Alliance unit, the Ultrafluor. This is the latest version of the Linear detector. Linear was purchased by Thermo. It would appear that Thermo is suffering from some serious manufacturing problems with this detector, and they aren't shipping any.

We also looked at the Waters and the Hitachi. Both are a bit more recent technology, but they are also examples of extensive system integration. The Waters unit was hugely expensive, priced right out of our market. The Hitachi was more reasonable, but also priced significantly higher than the Jasco, and this was due to having to add the analog output.

Hoping this is helpful to some,

Evan L. Cooper, Ph.D.

Evan, I suspect the "no response" means that no one Forum member has actually used that unit.

Tom,

Yeah that's cool. I was hoping to hear something from the fluorescence users out there, but perhaps I didn't phrase things in the right way to elict general response. Or, maybe there just aren't that many fluorescence users out there.

Evan

It appears that there are a number of fluorescence users, but maybe few who are in the comparing process, presently. For instance, we opted years ago for a Hitachi spectral photometer with a normal as well as a flow through cell, even though it was much more expensive than a Hitachi-Merck detector. The reason: The spectrometer was ~ 2x as sensitive (in flow through mode) as the detector and it was useable as a conventional spectrometer (still higher sensitivity).
The reason for not stating this earlier is simply that I figured you would not be interested. Incidentally, a low priced solution for a top notch machine can sometimes be a refurbished, second hand apparatus.

Just to put in my two bits.. We have had a couple of the dual monchrometer FL units from Shimadzu (I forget the model) for several years and have had good luck with them and the price/performance ratio is good, too. -- John