Overall, it has a pretty small footprint, even when you add in the fluidics tray and the autosampler. The doors and cover are secure yet easy and smooth to open.

It's encapsulated in a sturdy metal skin that is completely white with a few touches of color here and there. In fact, one of the more impressive things about the NovoCyte in general, is its build quality. It’s smooth, extremely flexible in the types of tubes/plates it accepts, it’s fast enough, and frankly, it just looks cool. Their implementation of the autosampler is probably the best I’ve seen to date. The NovoCyte hits both of these key features pretty well. Conversely, if these components fail from a usability standpoint, you can have the best performing instrument out there, and gain no traction at all in the marketplace. If you can nail these two parts of the instrument, you’ll be able to win over a large part of the community. I always like to say there are only two parts of a cytometer with which an end-user interacts - the software, and the sample loading apparatus. The tyranny of the default is extremely powerful, and the only way to break through the FACSDiVa wall is to create a cytometer that is a pleasure to use. It’s also probably true that you have your favorite set of expletives you rattle off every time you use a BD instrument running FACSDiVa. I have BD instruments running FACSDiVa and a bunch of users who know DiVa inside and out. No doubt, many readers are likely in the same position as me. Yes, there are some sacrifices you’ll need to make when going with the NovoCyte, but in many cases, it’s a small price to pay because, quite literally, it’s a small price to pay. Sure, it’s not in the same class spec wise, with the BD LSR-Fortessa, but then again, how many applications truly require a 5-laser 20 parameter, $350K instrument? Like most things in life, it’s all about the trade-off. I had a chance to spend a couple of months with the NovoCyte and can say that the goal post for a quality cytometer has once again been moved back. It’s pretty clear 3 lasers is the new 2, 4 lasers is the new 3, and 5+ lasers is the new 4. Of course, it's configurable starting at just 1 laser and 3 colors (1/3), with 2/4, 2/6, and 3/13 options (405nm, 488nm and 640nm). The NovoCyte is a 3-laser, 13 fluorescent parameter analyzer ready to do battle with the likes of Industry giant FACSCanto-II (Becton-Dickinson), a few newcomers like the CytoFlex (Beckman-Coulter), the Attune NxT (Thermo-Fisher), and other perennial contenders such as the Miltenyi MACSQuant, and instruments from Stratedigm, and Partec/Sysmex. Why enter the crowded flow cytometer market with a 3-laser, 13-color analyzer? Why not? Acea Biosciences (San Diego, CA) is yet another upstart cytometry company with aspirations of creating an easy-to-use, affordable workhorse analyzer targeted at the meat of all flow cytometry experiments hovering in the 6-8 parameter range.

Flowjo 10 normalization histogram