Chromatography Forum

I have to purchase a GC/MS system for lipid and pesticides analysis. I Know the Agilent products (6850/7890 joined to 5975C MSD detector) but I can't found much information about another products as Shimadzu GC/MS. Do you have any experience with no-agilent GC/MS systems?? Are Shimadzu products significantly better or cheaper??

Hello!

Agilent is the reference on GC analysis
It is simply, good support, high sensitivity, easy to work, a big oven door, Ion source is easy to dismount, low maintenance needed..ect. ...and some company sale Agilent consumables or equivalent.....

I use Agilent MSD for pesticide multiresiudes analysis (300 pesticides in two injections) since year 1998 and I have no problem....a low LOD, repeatability et reproductibiltity with low maintenance needed....i clean my ion source only one by year.....and my next msd instrument will be Agilent!

Hi Gerlad!

We have some Shimadzu system since many years in our lab and we are very happy. Be advised to consider also cost of autosampler in overall system: Shimadzu has on catalogue HT200H & HT250D that are very cheap but they offer also very great perfomance!

Hi,

I am new to Shimadzu GC/MS and have had to learn to use the system alone, so I am not sure my opinion is valid.

On the phone with tech support with Shimadzu I have heard..."oh..that's just crappy software" so many times it makes me want to growl in frustration.

I always used a HP GC/MS in college, but only for qualitative analysis - never quantitative like I am doing now. I remember I liked the HP though.

Once you get over a couple of weird software issues Shimadzu is easy to use. There's also a newer version available since we've purchased ours...so surely they've fixed those problems.

I can't say enough about the tech support at Shimadzu, though. I really have couldn't have asked for better customer service. I called with IGNORANT questions that I coudln't figure out with just the manual alone. They were very patient with me. They were never in a rush to get off the phone. Seriously, some have talked to me for over an hour to help me fix my problems and never once complained or growled

Anyway. I have no idea about others, but Shimadzu isn't bad. I like it now. I'm starting to feel like a pro heh

We have a Shimadzu 2010 GC/MS and it has been very good for us. The software is a bit hard to learn, but after you get past the learning curve is very nice. As mentioned the tech support is very good. I haven't used Agilent GC/MS systems, but I can tell you that I like our Shimadzu better than the Thermo-Finnigan GC/MS that we have.

I used to use a Varian Saturn 2000 GC/MS. I was happy with the the instrument, software and customer service. I think it's worth checking out.