Mass Spectrometry

Buying guide

This page spans several categories, so the price range is wider than on any one of them. Listed prices run from EUR 1 to EUR 400.457. The bottom of that range is consumables and small preparation items, the media and fittings that get replaced often; the top is a complete analyser, and in elemental work an ICP-MS system with its plasma and vacuum stack sits near the ceiling. A chromatograph lands between the two, and a data system is priced on its own again. Reading the range as one number misleads, because the expensive end is the analyser and the cheap end is what you feed it.

On condition, 86 percent of the listings are used. Used and refurbished units are listed below the price of new ones, and that price difference is the real reason to consider them, but condition matters more here than on simpler equipment: a vacuum system, a source, and a plasma torch all have service histories that affect what the instrument can still do. Where the choice between a used and a new unit is close, the detail sits in the individual listing, and a warranty is often possible and arranged in consultation for that specific listing rather than set across the board.

Because the work is a chain, the real buying question is rarely one instrument in isolation. A buyer assembling a full setup is matching a preparation method to a separation to an analyser, and a gap at any stage costs the whole run. The catalogue draws on 149 verified suppliers and distributors, which is where a setup gets sourced across its stages rather than one piece at a time.

Types of Mass Spectrometry

The equipment on this page falls into four groups: sample preparation hardware, chromatographs and their data systems, the analysers themselves including ICP-MS, and the chromatography media that feed them. Mass spectrometry runs as a sequence, and these are its stages. What follows walks that sequence in the order a sample passes through it, and says where one stage forces a choice at the next.

Why does sample preparation decide the run before the analyser sees anything?

Whatever reaches the source is what gets measured, including the parts of the matrix nobody wanted. The preparation bench exists to strip those out: extraction, clean-up, digestion for elemental work, derivatisation where a compound needs it. Get this wrong and no analyser setting recovers the run, because the interference is already in the sample.

The constraint that travels downstream is the solvent and the salt load. A clean-up that leaves a buffer behind will foul an electrospray source and suppress the ions you came for; a digestion that carries acid forward sets limits on what the plasma can tolerate. So the method chosen here is not free: it has to match the ionisation the analyser uses. Preparation that suits an elemental measurement is not the same preparation that suits an organic one, and the bench has to be set up for whichever the work needs.

Separating the sample: chromatography and its data systems

Most samples are mixtures, and feeding a mixture straight to an analyser asks it to resolve by mass what it should have resolved by chemistry first. The chromatograph spreads the components in time so each enters the source on its own. The choice here constrains the interface: a liquid separation and a gas separation hand the analyser different things, at different pressures, and the source has to be built for one or the other.

Behind the separation sits the data system, which is easy to treat as an afterthought and is not. The chromatography data system records the run, integrates the peaks, and holds the method that makes one run comparable to the next. A laboratory that standardises on one such system and then buys a chromatograph it cannot drive has bought two halves that do not meet. On the catalogue these sit as their own listings, chromatography data processing systems alongside the instruments, and they are worth matching deliberately rather than inheriting.

What separates the analysers, and where does ICP-MS sit?

The analyser is the stage the whole chain serves, and the split that matters first is what it is measuring. An organic workflow identifies molecules and needs a source that ionises them intact or fragments them in a controlled way. An elemental workflow asks which elements are present and at what concentration, and that is where ICP-MS belongs: the plasma breaks the sample down to its atoms and the analyser counts them. The two share the word spectrometry and little of the hardware, so the catalogue lists ICP and ICP-MS as their own group.

Which media and consumables feed the separation?

A separation is only as good as the column and the media packed into it, and these wear. Chromatography media is listed here because the stationary phase is a running cost, not a one-time purchase: it degrades, it is specific to the chemistry being run, and a tired column quietly widens every peak before it fails outright. Buying the analyser and the chromatograph without planning for the media is buying the machine and forgetting it needs feeding.