Hello all,

We’re looking to purchase a desktop SEM with EDS. Does anyone have any experiences or insights they’d like to share?

Much appreciated,

Frank

Frank Spear
Professor and Edward P. Hamilton Distinguished Educator Chair
Head, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
110 8th St., Troy NY 12180
518-276-6103
spearf@rpi.edumailto:spearf@rpi.edu

Hi Frank, we have loved our Phenom XL as a benchtop instrument. The support is good, the instrument is easy to use with good software, and it’s very fast to spin up.

-Lynne

From: Spear, Frank via MSA-talk msa-talk@minlists.org
Sent: Monday, August 18, 2025 12:33 PM
To: msa-talk@minlists.org msa-talk@minlists.org
Subject: [MSA-talk] Desktop SEMs

Hello all,

We’re looking to purchase a desktop SEM with EDS. Does anyone have any experiences or insights they’d like to share?

Much appreciated,

Frank

Frank Spear
Professor and Edward P. Hamilton Distinguished Educator Chair
Head, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
110 8th St., Troy NY 12180
518-276-6103
spearf@rpi.edumailto:spearf@rpi.edu

Hi all - I inadvertently ommitted a cc: to the List in a response I sent yesterday.  So, again: 
Our experience is that our Phenom Pharos provides very good image resolution, especially for a benchtop footprint.  It's easy to use and to train new operators.   
The negatives for us have been that service issues by remote diagnosis have been difficult and slow at times.  Additionally, the yearly maintenance requires shipping to the company facility with fairly long (~3-4 weeks) turnaround time. 
Steve Feldman
Yahoo Mail: Search, Organize, Conquer

On Wed, Aug 20, 2025 at 9:58 AM, Jinping Hu via MSA-talkmsa-talk@minlists.org wrote:  _______________________________________________
MSA-talk mailing list -- msa-talk@minlists.org
To unsubscribe send an email to msa-talk-leave@minlists.org

Last year one of our club members (Mineralogische Kring Antwerpen) purchased (privately) a JEOL JCM7000 Benchtop SEM-EDX. As I have > 25 years of experience in that field he asked me to help him starting up his instrument in practice to identify mineral samples.

All features worked very well: effortless perfect SEM SE-images, it has a good backscattered electrons detector and an EDX system. Everything we tried went smoothly, and after a few hours we had already a series of samples imaged and analyzed, which lead to several interesting determinations, sometimes of unexpected species.

I remember one technical detail that really made me speechless: the benchtop was installed on just a (quite solid though) kitchen-type table, and even in those circumstances it seemed to be completely insensitive to vibrations, even at somewhat higher magnifications. So it can be used in an environment that I would normally consider as inappropriate for SEM-work.

Unfortunately, the owner of the instrument in question died suddenly a few months later, so I can't provide you with his address data etc. or ask him more information.

If you want more information just contact the Jeol sales organization in your region or myself via rik.dillen@skynet.be.

Kind regards,

Rik Dillen -  mailto:rik.dillen@skynet.be rik.dillen@skynet.be
Mineralogische Kring Antwerpen -  http://www.minerant.org/ www.minerant.org

Lid worden van de MKA ?  http://www.minerant.org/MKA/lidworden.html www.minerant.org/MKA/lidworden.html

MINERANT – See you in May 2026!

Antwerp Expo

From: Spear, Frank via MSA-talk msa-talk@minlists.org
Sent: Monday, August 18, 2025 6:34 PM
To: msa-talk@minlists.org
Subject: [MSA-talk] Desktop SEMs

Hello all,

We’re looking to purchase a desktop SEM with EDS. Does anyone have any experiences or insights they’d like to share?

Much appreciated,

Frank

Frank Spear
Professor and Edward P. Hamilton Distinguished Educator Chair
Head, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
110 8th St., Troy NY 12180
518-276-6103
spearf@rpi.edu mailto:spearf@rpi.edu

Dear fellow mineralogists,

This is the final notice on the session proposal of IMA 2026 Nanjing. The session proposal for IMA2026 will close soon on August 31st.

Please visit the meeting website, IMA 2026, and the submission site of the session proposal: IMA 2026 Nanjing. You can get important information on the venue, the beautiful city, Nanjing, from the meeting website.

As the 2nd Vice-President, I and our LOC in Nanjing are planning a fruitful meeting. We would like to ask all of you to support IMA Nanjing meeting by making registration and submitting a session proposal on topic related to your expertise. We would be very grateful if you could ensure that the next general assembly will be a great success and continue to keep in touch on issues related to the 2026 IMA Nanjing meeting.

The meeting website and important schedule of the IMA2026 Nanjing are as follows:

the meeting website, http://ima2026.nju.edu.cn. Session proposal site, IMA 2026 Nanjing.

The session proposal deadline: August 31, 2025

You can submit the session proposal after registration in the website, or send your proposal to ima2026@nju.edu.cn

The abstract submission: open from October 15, 2025, to March 1, 2026.

IMA 2026 Nanjing meeting: from August 20 to 24, 2026.

We are looking forward to having your session proposals for IMA2026.

Best wishes,

Eiji Ohtani, President of IMA

Nancy Ross, 1st-vice President of IMA

Xiancai Lu, 2nd Vice President of IMA

Hans-Peter Schertl, Past-President of IMA

Prof. Xiancai Lu (陆现彩)

School of Earth Sciences and Engineering
Nanjing University
163 Xianlin Road, Qixia District
Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, 210023
China

Email: xcljun@nju.edu.cn