While some companies make the decision to take floor-standing instruments down to the benchtop, other companies market their analytical products for the benchtop initially. One such company is Shimadzu Scientific Instruments (Columbia, M.D.). Benefiting the pharmaceutical, food and beverage, environmental, biochemistry, and polymer industries, the new UV-1800 is part of Shimadzu’s natural progression of spectrophotometers, which “first were marketed in 1952,” says Kevin McLaughlin, senior marketing communications coordinator at Shimadzu.
The UV-1800 is a compact, double beam UV-VIS spectrophotometer “that uses the Czerny-Turner mounting for its monochromator, and provides a high resolution of 1 nm with a bright optical system,” says McLaughlin. With a width of 450 nm, the instrument meets the rigorous size constraints of labs. Designed to satisfy customer demand, the instrument was created to conserve bench space and allow users to utilize more and different types of instruments. And, with “the advent of so many research techniques, researchers value the opportunity to utilize different analytical instruments/methods and need smaller instruments to utilize lab space,” continues McLaughlin. While before it may have been customary for laboratories to use one specific instrument for their research purposes due to the size and energy consumption of floor-standing instruments, benchtop models allow for a wide variety of analytical equipment to be present and enhance research in labs.
The spectrophotometer also can be used as either a stand-alone instrument or “as a PC-controlled instrument,” says McLaughlin. The instrument allows for USB memory to be directly connected, which enables data for spectra and time-course curves to be displayed and saved with commercial spreadsheet software on a PC.
While floor-standing analytical instruments will remain on the market, laboratories have taken a turn to benchtop market-specific instruments. “The trend of developing more compact instruments will continue as product developers and engineers better utilize the newer technologies that enable smaller, lighter components,” concludes McLaughlin.
More info: www.ssi.shimadzu.com
Published in R & D magazine: Vol. 51, No. 7, December, 2009, p.23.
