The Red Tide Spectrometer is another addition to the burgeoning spectrometer market that has seen an explosion in its popularity.
With manufacturers such as Applied Biosystems and Agilent Technologies firmly established, its makers have targeted a niche market in which they hope this product will flourish.
The Red Tide's selling point is its low starting price, which the company say is no compromise on performance comparing favourably to more costly systems.
The system boasts a spectral response from 350-1000 nm, an order-sorting filter to eliminate second-order effects, and integration times as fast as 3 milliseconds.
The Red Tide's modular design can be configured with various Ocean Optics optical bench accessories, light sources and sampling optics, to create application-specific systems for thousands of absorbance, reflection and emission applications.
With its small footprint (89.1 mm x 63.3 mm) and USB interface the spectrometer is ideally suited to small-to-medium labs, taking up minimal workspace.
The Red Tide interfaces to PCs via its USB port, which streamlines start-up and supports hot swapping of the spectrometer.
It also interfaces to Pasco's Xplorer GLX, a unique combination of datalogger and lab analysis tool that eliminates the need for a PC
Red Tide operates via SpectraSuite Spectroscopy Software, the first spectroscopy operating software to run in Macintosh, Linux and Windows.
A special version of SpectraSuite is available with a module for educational use, with features such as a Beer's Law calculator for absorbance experiments.