The UVP PhotoDoc-It™ 50 system is a great example of a piece of equipment doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. To all intents and purposes, it’s a camera, a box and a printer. For that very reason, my lab had never invested in the hugely over-priced similar products that have been available for years. The UVP PhotoDoc-It™ is significantly less expensive than other products with precisely the same specifications. So for this reason alone, it’s worth a look. This is an entry-level system, which produces good quality images of gels, but not much more. It does not offer any image analysis or densitometry features. It has been designed simply to record and print good photos of electrophoresis gels, and it does this pretty well.
The system looks good, in a tasteful purple color, and has a small footprint (trans-illuminator & camera 36cm x 28cm x 51cm; photo-printer 18cm x 13cm x 6cm). The printer is scarcely bigger than the 6”x4” images it produces. Initially, I had some set-up issues, the default settings didn’t really give me good resolution. But after adjusting the camera settings (this was a little bit fiddly and annoying), I was able to get really good images. Once this was done, the camera retained these settings, which means capturing a gel image now takes less than one minute. The camera has a resolution of 7.1 megapixels, which is more than enough to capture nice crisp bands. The camera also has a filter for ethidium bromide stained gels, and this can be inter-changed to suit other fluorophores. Images are automatically stored in the camera memory, and can be transferred electronically to PC easily.
The bench-top trans-illuminator is quite powerful, and generates a lot of heat. I noticed that over time, a gel can begin to evaporate inside the “cone”. This causes condensation to collect on the exposed side of the camera filter. This is not ideal, and leads to blurry and discoloured images. However, this is not a big problem in the grand scheme of things, and can be avoided if you take the photograph as quickly as possible.
The printer is in fact a Canon Selphy brand digital photo-printer. This means that the supplies are easy to get hold of. The paper and ink come as a complete package, so there are no worries about running out of ink halfway through an image. The printing is fast (about 2 minutes to complete a picture), and quiet. It’s super-easy to use (just a couple of buttons to press from positioning the gel to having a final printed image), and on the whole, is pretty cost effective to run.
| Comment on this Review |
Comments? Questions? Discuss this review of PhotoDoc-It-50-Imaging-System-From-UVP with the rest of the Biocompare community.
|
Dr. Daniel Palmer
Collaborative Research Manager
Q Chip Ltd
United Kingdom
more articles...
