Contributed by Dr. Alexei Gratchev

A good low budjet choice of PCR cycler. It is fast and reliable. A bit strange block size 5x5 makes it not very useful when usign standart 8x0.2ml tube stripes, however the copmany offers 5x0.2ml stripes as well as 5x5 plates. The lid is constructed in the way that you can use 0.5 ml tubes as well. However this lid is also a weak point of the cycler. In our case it was broken after 8 months, but the company repaired it within 3 days. The block is detachable, however there is only one type of block avaliable. The programming is very simple and totally intuitive. It's almost impossible to make a mistake, thanks to a big screen (by the way, the screen started to work inproperly after 2 years, I don't know how fast was the repair). These problems seem to be solved in the later versions of the cylcler since the second cycler of this type in our departement works without problems since 3 years. The price is really low. We paid about € 2500 for one Primus 25, and I think it was a good deal. At the moment there is a big brother (Primus 96) is also avaliable. It is very similar to Primus 25, the only difference is the block size and of course the price.