advice on phosphorimager purchase

[Roland J Saldanha]

>Ross.Thomas at med.monash.edu.au
>

I do not own & have never seen a Fuji in action but from sales information have
learnt that their machine has a 8 bit or 10 bit digital resolution.  This is 
intrinsically inferior to both MD & Bio-RAD which offer 16 bit resolution.  
Thus even though a Photomultiplier tube might have 5 logs of response this is
chopped into only 256 or 1024 digital chunks by the Fuji.  The same 
information would be represented by 65,536 digital values on a machine with 16 
bit resolution.  The small file size is of course a direct consequence of this 
and far from being an advantage is a distinct disadvantage since quantitation 
is compromised by squeezing a huge dynamic range of data into 256 or 1024 
digital values.

Your subsequent comments on resolution of the MD being better than film are 
confusing since it is not clear whether you mean spatial or digital resolution.
Spatially, film is definitely superior to any phosphorimager on the market 
(Most manufacturers claim a resolution of 1.9 line pairs/mm which film can beat
hands down).

Roland Saldanha