I’m wondering what people’s thoughts are on the current capper/decappers on the market?
I see a couple of posts from a year or more past. If you have specific thoughts on what is good or bad and why, I’d love to hear it!
Heard good things about LVL and AltemisLab. The standard is Thermo Matrix or Azenta FluidX but they are far from perfect.
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I’m currently looking at an Altemis and the Azenta model. Your reply, thank you btw, seems to be a general consensus for what I’ve seen.
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Assume you are looking for a 96-at-once decapper, or are you referencing the single tube re-array/weigh which also have cap/decap and liquid handling functionality.
I have had interactions with people who have had very good opinions of the Azenta/LVL, and then the complete opposite experience from others.
I can only suspect that the cap-decapper combination is very important and would encourage you to try it out in-person if you can!
I have experience with Micronic + Afys3G , LVL and Azenta from covid times - all were under heavy load. The mechanism of Micronic was the most reliable by far at that time. Probably because you just hardcode all the parameters, no height sensors there and everything is heavy duty metal. LVL was ok with occasional errors and FluidX was disaster (could be that it was just not optimised well with micronic tubes, but anyway the cap drop off system with tiny pins was problematic).
BUT with the time passed, FluidX apparently worked on issues and the current model seem to be pretty reliable. The issue when you are stuck with caps inside and there is no way how to put them back on tubes still happens when there is a power outage or some other interruption of the process.
Since guys in Altemis are mostly former FluidX employes, I would expect at least similar quality from them.
Hope it gives some light on this.
No real issues with our Azenta/LVL set up
We ended up going with the mid Altemis model. It was just installed so not a great deal of usage yet. I’ll come back and update here when I have a bit more experience with it. Thank you for the responses!