Hi

I use the ChemiDoc XRS (I am not sure if you also need Chemilumiscent detection) from BioRad as well as all their reagents/equipment and software analysis (Quantity One) for Western blot assays for many years and I am really very happy with it. Hope this helps you.

I recommend you Biorad - GelDoc XR+ ..is easy to use and provide diversity of analysis.

I have used this system during my PhD at University of Konstanz, DE, and got very nice data interpretation.

I worked with: BioRad, Cleaver, Owl.

All had a nice agarose system, Cleaver was the best for PAGE.

I'd go for the Cleaver.

Hi

I use the ChemiDoc XRS (I am not sure if you also need Chemilumiscent detection) from BioRad as well as all their reagents/equipment and software analysis (Quantity One) for Western blot assays for many years and I am really very happy with it. Hope this helps you.

Biorad - GelDoc XR+

I did not have good experiences with BioRad and also do not recommend GE. I don't know much about the other brands, but I would give a try to UVItec (www.uvitec.co.uk): they are a Cambridge based company specialised in fluorescent and chemiluminescent imaging and analysis systems. We have a UVItec Alliance and it is extremely good for chemiluminescence detection and quantification: bright objective, large CCD sensor, wide dynamic range. Also price was affordable. Worth a try.

If you want to capture ECL you need a good cooled CCD camera - the light box should have a good quality UV box, internal light source and filters on the camera to get different fluorescent probes. As a guide - if the supplier cannot tell you who built the camera, cannot service it, cannot supply a repair manual fo the camera - dont buy it. BioRad OEMs the camera and if anything goes wrong you have to send the camera you have to send it to Canada for repair. The fan on the camera had stopped working and burned out the peltier devices so the cooling stopped and the camera was no longer useful for ECL. No repair manual, no parts - send to some place in CAnada to get fixed - no quotes. This is a $30K camera and was less than 3 years old,

You need to also check the specs on the camera - these are pretty ordinary on most of them (1.2meg and -40 cooling to reduce dark current and noise). It should be possible to get a 10+ megapixel camera and -100 rather than -40 to reduce dark current. Also be careful of proprietry software for capture - you cant attach another camera successfully to a proprietry capture system You can get amateur astronomy cooled ccd cameras for ~ $5000 - cooled to -100 and ~ 10 megapixels - If you can figure out how to attach one to an old system and get a frame capture card for your computer system It would then be worth buying in image pro or similar for image analysis.

There are a number ofproducts on the market - They are basically a dark box with a camera and uv source with a couple of fluorescent tubes in them - the business end is a good wuality high resolution cold camera - the se=pecs on this are key. Also the software shoud be non proprietary and installable on a number of systems in the lab.

Hi we have a vilber lourmat fx7, which is excellent. It cools the camera to -67oc below ambient.

I recommend BIO-RAD CHEMI DOC XRS or BIO-RAD Molecular-Imager. The first is a scanner having many options, and even a stain-free blot can be captured. The second, Molecular-Imager may be the best, but too costly. in any case, if you associates any of these documentation system with a BIO-RAD turbo-blotter, which can perform blotting in just 7 minutes, your lab will be at its best level of performance.

We bought recently the ChemiDoc from BioRad. We use it for Chemoluminiscence and for Colorimetric immune detection, as well for Commassie, Silver and Zink staining. I am extremely happy with it! We compared different machines (Intas and GE) and although all were similar, the decision was partially made because of 2 factors: Customer service is in BioRad excellent and the software for working and quantifying the signals is for FREE!!! I can install it in my personal computer and analyze the data when I am on the road! The software is as well user friendly and makes very nice reports in PDF after you have analyze it. The only thing we noticed is that the chemoluminiscence reagent made a LOT of difference. THe other labs in our Institute were using GE reagents and we are using Millipore. With the GE reagents they needed almost an hour for exposure, we needed 60 seconds. Now all labs here changed to millipore.

I hope I could be of help for your decision.

I would just like to give a big thanks to everyone that has kindly taken the time to give their advice. I have tried numerous other methods to get some input from fellow scientists and ResearchGate has been the only place I have actually received useful information. Again, thank you all!

Nicholas James Morris

Big Thank you posting this question in research-gate. I have same question and now i know how  to go form here.

Amalia Enríquez-de-Salamanca and Luisa F. Jimenez: thank you for your comments. Very helpful.

Anyone have rough idea about cost for complete ChemiDoc XRS system? appreciated. I know it may be varied to place to place. just rough estimation please

Also be aware that some companies sell systems, where the cameras post-process your raw images:

1. Some cameras have a gain more or less than 1, which leads to distorted intensities. Therefore band intensities in the middle gray scales can be 5x higher than they actually are.

2. In some systems they also cut-off the very low range of your grey scale to get rid of noise, but this might change the relative intensities of faint bands. Simply check if you have the gray scale you should have for a certain bit-system. For example, if you have 16bit camera the TIFF-files should range from 0-65536. If your image file just go up to about 63000, it's pretty sure, that the file was post-process by the system and you do not have raw data anymore.

3. By interpolation some companies try to sell you a higher camera resolution that it actually have. The call it than for example "image resolution", which is not the physical resolution of your CCD chip.