At Pittcon 2009, Shimadzu's IG-1000 took the bronze in the "Editors' Choice Award" for best new products. This is quite an achievement since more than 1100 companies representing tens of thousands of products were on display. The IG-1000 utilizes new technology for measuring nano particles by a method referred to as Induced Grating. The new technology has three main advantages over the current technology of dynamic light scattering (DLS). First, the sensitivity is the same when measuring a 1 nm particle or 100 nm particles. With DLS a 1 nm particle is 1 million times less sensitive then a 100 nm particle. Second and third, interferences from clustering or contamination are significantly reduced or eliminated. These latter two interferences are a major problem with the DLS technique. Other techniques such as Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) are time consuming and expensive compared to Shimadzu's IG-1000.