At this week’s PITTCON 2008 meeting in New Orleans, more new technologies were introduced to the roughly 20,000 attendees than we were able to cover in this newsletter this week. Most of the large instrument suppliers had new products that numbered in double digits. All the classic buzz words were readily apparent—green, nano (or smaller), easy-to-use, ultra-performance, ultra-fast, process analyzers, and more. Hot applications like biofuel analyzers, food quality testers, and consumer product analyzers were also prominent, reflecting solutions to recently identified areas of concern. PerkinElmer went so far as to combine them all into their Econanalytix initiative (which in reality was launched last fall).

The overall mood of the show was positive. Exhibitors were repeatedly asked if they saw any downturn to their specific businesses that might mirror the talk of a recession in the general economy. And almost to a man, they repeatedly responded that they had not seen any slowing of their sales from their research-based customers. Even those with pharmaceutical-based customers had not seen any slowdown in instrument sales. Indeed, academic sales seem to be burgeoning for many of them.

Globalization also has not severely affected sales of instruments to U.S. firms, according to the exhibitors. Granted sales of analytical instruments are climbing in Asian countries, still the bulk of the marketplace resides in the U.S. New features in this year’s product announcements also could in many areas be termed as revolutionary, rather than the traditional evolutionary announcements. Hot revolutionary items—like Erlab’s GreenFumeHood or Gilson’s fraction trapping system—had lines of interested parties from the opening bell on Monday.

It’s always exciting to go to PITTCON to learn about the new products and technologies—this was my 20th outing—this year’s event just appeared to be more exciting than most.

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