Guy's comments are very interesting but continue to point up BioRad as a sort of headless giant, uncertain of its moves and possibly unable to keep all of its technology entirely intact as one division moves ahead of another. Yes, BioRad has seemed to do a very good job in producing a versatile, reasonably easy to use confocal in the 1000 model, which is very important. What they don't seem to recognize is that they make a commitment to a site when they sell those folks an instrument. It looks very bad for them if they don't entirely seem to understand their own software or hardware, or if they don't actively jump in and help somebody who is struggling with a particular problem with the hardware. Guy's absolutely right that they should standardize their hardware, and make clear upgrade routes if they expect the system owners to upgrade the system by themselves. I'd add that maybe they should make sure that their software/hardware combinations are airtight and super-reliable, and that they are accessible and relatively easy to mount in third party boxes, if they intend the users to do it themselves. Reliable is always better than pretty and unreliable. Let's face it, if somebody hadn't been screaming out there in the darkness we wouldn't have this discussion. Case in fact, the particular problem that initiated all this discussion occurred not because of an inherent difficulty with the hardware; in fact it was a problem specific to the machine; a card edge connector, it seems, was either dirty or damaged. In this case, BioRad's hardware *was* ok. Bad connectors happen all the time. They are not "illogical" as somebody put. Question is, why didn't BioRad make a few real suggestions, and send somebody over to check it out? Or fully engage and try to think it through? That's the real problem. And maybe the person with the problem didn't ask the right people. But, you'd think BioRad would jump on a problem so that their rep remains intact. The End.