What do you look for in a sequencer?

[jbannonARK]

Hey all,

My name is James. I work for a small investment start up and I have some questions about sequencers.


I know that Illumina currently dominates the sequencing market in terms of volume of instruments sold, and with the HiSeq X release they have, for the time being, established a lead in human sequencing.

For those of you actually doing research, I have a few questions:

- What do you look for in a DNA sequencer, when making a purchasing decision? Throughput? Sample prep? Anything else specific

- If you use an Illumina machine, what do you like about it, what do you dislike? What would make you switch to a different machine?


My hope here is to get an "on the ground" sense of what drives the adoption of new sequencing technologies.

Thanks in advance for the help.

Best,
James