IBO has selected LECO’s new TruTOF HT as the best new product from this year’s ASMS meeting in Indianapolis. Although the aesthetics of this new GC-TOF mass spectrometer are quite subdued, everything else about the new system is to the contrary. For starters, the system is a benchtop design, comparable in size to the only other commercial benchtop GC-TOF system on the market, which is from Waters. The other two commercial GC-TOF systems currently on the market, from LECO and JEOL, are floor-standing systems. Secondly, the TruTOF HT has an acquisition speed of 80 Hz or spectra per second. Such performance is second only to LECO’s Pegasus GC-TOF and is more than three times the speed of any other model of GC/MS.

However, the most impressive aspect of this system is the price, which is expected to be well below the $100,000 mark and may even be as low as $75,000 with special discounts and rebates. Even at $100,000, this represents a price point 30% lower than any other commercial GC-TOF and puts it on par with most single quadrupole GC/MS systems. With such a combination of price and performance, the new TruTOF HT is likely to not only help LECO gain market share in the GC/MS market, but may even expand the market to users who could not afford higher priced systems and who may now be able to take advantage of the capabilities of TOF mass spectrometry, such as end-users in the environmental and food testing markets.