James, We have indeed seen a similar problem with our "new" red diode with the mini-cooling fan. After a perfect installation and a couple of months of excellent performance, it began to drift until it was out of alignment and needed a service call. This was only a month ago that I had the call, so I do not know if this is going to happen again. My understanding from BD was that the reason for switching to the new lasers was supposed to be longer life with the extra cooling. This may be true, and I may not have another alignment problem now that it has been fixed. I think only BD can answer if this is a recurring problem, I won't know until it has been used for another couple of months. Randy T. Fischer NIH/NIAMS Building 10, Room 6D57 9000 Rockville Pike Bethesda, MD 20892 (301) 594-3537 fischer1@mail.nih.gov > ---------- > From: James F. George, Ph.D. > Sent: Monday, December 17, 2001 5:26 PM > To: Cytometry Mailing List > Subject: FACSCalibur Red Diode Laser Reliability > > Greetings fellow flow cytometrists > > We recently acquired a new dual laser facscalibur. We have had some > serious problems with the stability of the red diode laser. In two > months, the laser has been changed out three times and our fourth service > call for the same problem will commence tomorrow. Typically, one will > observe a decline in sensitivity in fluorescence in channels that rely on > the use of the diode laser, accompanied by a large increase in the amount > of compensation required for those same fluorescence channels (I am being > deliberately non-specific here to accomodate those who do not have BD > instruments, for those facscalibur users, I am obviously talking about > FL4, but this would depend on the fluorochromes that were being used etc). > I went with BD because my previous long experience with the highly > reliable Facsscan and the fact that I really needed two lasers. > Unfortunately, the other laser is not useful if it is unreliable. > > Have others experienced this problem, particularly since BD switched > suppliers for the diode laser? > > This is making me crazy. Any info you have on this would be useful. I am > working with BD on this (upper management has been pretty responsive), but > currently I have not seen a permanent solution to the problem. > > -James >
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