Looking for good colony counter - (Jun/27/2011 )

Hi all.
Hope this is the correct sub forum.

We are looking for a cheap-ish and good colony counter. Found this one:
http://www.biologics-inc.com/colony_counter_models.html

However they don't answer mail, news section on website is from 2008. Makes me suspicious.

Anyone know this brand?
Or maybe you know of a good one in the same prize range?

Thank you, and have a nice day.

If you have a gel doc or similar camera to take pictures of your plates, ImageJ (freeware from NIH) can do the job quite well.

bob1 on Mon Jun 27 09:51:36 2011 said:

We tried that with a regular camera, did not work that well for us. We have large number of colonies sometimes. But, thanks for the tip.

All these colony counters do the same thing as bob1 told but with built-in software (which also requires calibration). So maybe you should develop a processing pipeline in ImageJ that will be optimal for your photos.

Anyway if there are lots of colonies and they overlap it maybe impossible to resolve them using any algorithm (including one in commercial colony counter). In such case you can calculate something like integral colony area, etc.