Hello Everybody
Need to have your opinion about different brands of HPLCs : Shimadzu, PE, Agilent.
Thanks

I am responsible for the maintenance,repair and general usage of 160 Agilent HPLC systems. Buy an Agilent....

Martin;

You are likely to hear better opinions if you narrow down your request. Otherwise you will get lots of comments about each and every name of instruments being good or excellent.

Are you looking for best overall peformance for general use?, or are you interested in doing some special work, such as high throughput, or LC-MS?, or perhaps you are willing to sacrifice some performance for a lower price?.

Also, it is conceivable that you are looking for the best customer support, or the best long-term technology development?.

I hope this helps you;

Benjamin

Thanks Benjamin
I m looking for overall performance with best or should I say good service support.

Service support may vary significantly depending on the country or region you are in. We have had good reliability with Shimadzu. The service support has also been good (midwest US).

we run a multi vendor HPLC lab and I can tell you that nothing touches the top 2 vendors (Agilent and Waters) for reliability, robustness and reproducibility on an ongoing basis.

Martin;

I see that you are already getting opinions. In my work place I have evaluated many different types of instruments and manufacturers. Here is my 20 cents worth of wisdom.

Agilent currently has the best overall service/quality/price performance of all manufacturers. Waters has very good instrumentation and service but they are somewhat overpriced, and their software is not as well developed or friendly. Otherwise the choice between the two of them is difficult. They also seem to have the best recognized people in the area.

Varian and Perkin Elmer have fallen behind in terms of service/applications/innovation. They seem to rarely come up with something new, and their commitment to the long-term development of the technology is not clear. Their advantage is a well established name.

Dionex, Shimadzu and Hitachi perhaps have good instrumentation, but in my opinion they do not have the qualified people to sell it well or train and support their users. This is the kind of problem I usually see when the actual instrument development is done abroad, and the local people have to make lots of call overseas to answer questions.

Well, I hope this helps you. Good Luck.

Benjamin

Benjamin,

Could you define the term "not as well developed" as it applies to the software from Waters?

Just curious,

Andrew

Andrew;

Perhaps I over extended the expression "not as friendly" which is what I meant to say. In our Labs, people prefers the Agilent software. Waters' seem to be designed with other philosophy in mind. But the main ojection to waters hardware has been its price.

Obviously, all these comments are subjective.

Benjamin

Andrew,
Perhaps you have been unlucky (or I have been lucky) as I have found the Waters hardware to be pretty competitively priced with respect to the competition, particularly when the extended waranties are included. Service is pretty hot too, and possibly more importantly for us here, we know that we can have confidence in their engineers when they come in to do the work. Another vendors staff (who shall remain nameless) generally cause more problems than they resolve when they visit.

On the software front, I was really amazed to find that the network client server version of the waters software was easily the cheapest option that we looked at. It was almost half the price of that offered by a (much smaller) competitor.

As I also run a multi vendor lab, I can echo the comments of anomymous in saying that you cannot go far wrong with the top two players (Agilent and Waters)when it comes to all round quality. I hope to phase out all other vendors HPLC hardware in my lab and focus on these vendors in the future.

Colin;

I understand your message above, and is obvious that you have a good relationship with Waters. In my workplace we used to have only Waters instruments for a long time. Slowly, over the years we drifted away from them, mostly because price and some communication problems. Now with the exception of some GPC and LC-MS systems (perhaps five) there are no more waters instruments, this is small considering that we have over 70 systems installed.

One other thing is clear, we have been able to negotitate good prices from other suppliers but not with Waters.

Benjamin

Here's how most people buy LC equipment:

Call the major vendors
speak and meet with their sales people
call their tech support lines and see how easy/difficult it is to reach someone
ask for a demo
visit their websites, etc

You will not get unbiased opinions here. The last thing that someone wants to say is that I spent $50K and the LC stinks.

Thank u all for your time & the information.

You have already had some very good advice from the other contributors. I prefer Agilent mainly based on my familiarity but I would agree that Waters are equivalent. I would not consider looking elsewhere.

However, your question is rather vague. If you could generate a user/functional requirement specification and provide this to several vendors, you may well find that this may filter out some suppliers. If you work in a GxP environment then your company probably has policies or guidelines on generating requirement specification documents. Don`t forget that you the RS is about your software requirements as well as hardware. You may also need to consider 21CFR11 with which vendor compliance varies.

If you want to e-mail me directly we can discuss in more detail. Also you should look at GAMP4 for validation requirements at the ISPE web site although this is expensive to purchase.

My background is computer system validation which is why I have given you advice of this nature.

I have experience with Waters 2690's, the older HP 1090's and Agilent 1100's.

Without question the Agilent 1100 I feel is superior in every respect. Would rather use one of the old 1090's over a Waters 2690. Software is much easier and more importantly quicker. Importing of c-grams to reports is a breeze with Chemstation. I can make a mobile phase and put it on the instrument and go, no sparging no errors. Waters we must sparge mobile phases and still have errors due to air in the lines, their degasser rarely works (this is on 3 different 2690's). Just one chemists opinion.

Anonymous,

It's right, Waters has got some problems with the degasser, but if you had a service plan, they make no problem of it and change your degaser for the new version. Never had problems with the new version.
When I make some mobile phase, I always filtrate my mobile phase, and then put it onto the HPLC. If you have problems with air in the tubings, I recommend you to clean up your solvent filter.

I have some experience with older and newer 2690's, a 2695, and lot of other manufacturers, and I prefer Waters. You are right that Waters is more priced, but the service you get is it worth. We had ever such problem that we have let come some technician, always fixed it by ourself, wich can't say of the other manufacturers.