The Edge pH meter from Hanna Instruments is a new highly refined digital testing device which firmly breaks away from the design standards of contemporary laboratory testing equipment. Rather than looking like a blocky and intimidating slab of water testing plastic, the Hanna Edge looks like it was made from the mold of a modern smartphone with a huge LCD screen, touch sensitive buttons and a thin profile that makes it almost pocketable.
Despite having a 5.5 inch high contrast monochrome screen and a really avant-garde appearance, what makes the Edge pH meter so tantalizing is its ability to also accept a conductivity probe or a dissolved oxygen probe. The edge doesn’t use the laboratory standard BNC connection for its probes and opts instead to communicate via a mall 3.5mm audio-style jack; this in part to make the Edge as ungainly as possible but also, probably, to lock customers into using Hanna’s probes with the proprietary connection.
The Hanna Edge is quite possibly the antithesis to the Hanna Checker which was geared towards the aquarium hobby with a $50 price point. Meanwhile the half inch thick Hanna Edge is firmly targeting the critical testing applications of water testing labs which will be attracted by either its portable nature, its wall mount for monitoring application or the benchtop cradle and probe holder for cycling through lots and lots of samples.
Priced at $400 for the base pH testing package the Hanna Edge comes with the wall mount holder, the cradle and probe holder, a glass body refillable pH probe with temperature sensor and the calibration solutions, cables and chargers to get this new high performance water testing tool work out of the box.Other electrodes available for the Edge include high grade conductivity and dissolved oxygen sensors, both priced at $335 each.
What makes the electrodes for the Edge unique is an onboard chip that is preloaded with calibrated buffers, date, time, offset and slope characteristics of the electrode; we’re not super sure what all that means but we gather it means these electrodes are more sophisticated than the replaceable gel-filled probes we typically use in our aquariums. We don’t suppose that the Edge will appeal to the casual aquarists but the LFS, public aquariums and fish nurseries who process a lot of water samples will some edge to using the Hanna Edge pH meter over conventional testing methods. [Hanna]
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