We had Symphony on trial for about a year and found that it didn't suit our Lean organized lab. The machine is built to handle a large amount of trays at once (the tower and the different staining modules have great capacity) but for each tray you load the processing time increases with whatever time the baking is set to (we set it to 12 minutes because of problems with "flying" needle biopsies) since there is only ONE oven. We set the max number of trays to load at once to 4 but always ended up with a huge batch late in the day that got stained in the evening and had to be taken out and sorted in the morning >> uneven work load.
Symphony is great in that it hardly requires any weekly maintanence at all and is ergonomically good, but on the other hand it continously wants to be fed boxes, large amounts of 99% ethanol and those stinky Clear bottles that are devilish (!) to open. Lots of waste packaging, and we at least had no way to separate waste for destruction (everything went into the sewage.) Huge footprint, nosiy, limonen smell (when changing bottles) and requires destilled water - it can't be placed just anywhere in the lab like the stainer we have now (Dako Coverstainer). Trays are loaded from two sides so they require constant turning by the histotech to be able to read slide labels, and after a while the springs holding the slides get broken off. Also, we had to specially adapt trays to hold supermega slides but the staining on those tended to be uneven. We also had continous problems with the mounting module - misaligned coverslips, bubbles, moisture. Little things that get annoying when handling several hundred slides each day! Too bad for a piece of hardware that promised such ease of use... Nina Pries Histotech Clinical Pathology Lund Sweden -----Ursprungligt meddelande----- Från: Gudrun Lang [mailto:gu.l...@gmx.at] Skickat: den 1 augusti 2012 09:31 Till: histonet@lists.utsouthwestern.edu Ämne: [Histonet] symphony another question Hi! A question for Symphony-users. Do you enjoy working with the Symphony? Is it really a change to the better in comparison to other combined staining-coverslipping devices? I don't ask for quality or patient security - just for user concerns. Did it ever happen, that a run-error turned the system down (like it sometimes does with our Ultra)? What are the consequences? Just curious. Gudrun _______________________________________________ Histonet mailing list Histonet@lists.utsouthwestern.edu http://lists.utsouthwestern.edu/mailman/listinfo/histonet
