Why should you try the free listmode analysis program MFI?  Consider these
comments from MFI users.  MFI is used regularly in flow facilities in
Australia, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, and in the USA (Bethesda MD,
Madison WI, San Diego CA).

"... it gives medians quickly, and it's possible to view all the file
parameters at once. ... We use the program regularly, a couple of days a week.
If we weren't using it we'd use PCLYSYS or WINLIST or LYSYS or WinMDI."

"... smoothing and peak detection are very good -- features not included in
the Coulter software. The printing options are a big advance on the Elite
software, which is pretty inflexible and wastes a lot of space."

"Fast & easy to use application for analysis; good profile smoothing &
statistics generation; simple print-out without unnecessary information;
colour printing capability."

"... investigators here like the overlay plots it produces much better than
those I can generate from the EPICS ELITE software I use for most of my data
processing.  I find that I'm more comfortable with [MFI's] linear median
numbers than I am with [log values] as a result of looking at too many
histograms from EPICS V and C cytometers."

"The capability of creating real dot plots and the possibility of converting
listmode data to ASCII are important features, which are not in the Coulter
Elite software."

"[MFI] was pivotal for our work. PC-LYSYS from Becton-Dickinson ...
costs in Japanese yen more than our annual budget.  To obtain Kd values from
the titration curves we needed mean fluorescence values on linear scale rather
than the average on log scale given by the FACScan program.  I tried to
acquire data in linear scale using the Consort30 program [but this gave
unacceptably] poor resolution...."

"I do my flow cytometry in another building and find it convenient for  
analysing data back in my other lab."

"What I like about MFI so far: Batch Processing and KMESF conversion factors.
I also like being able to export FCS to ASCII for the many users I serve."

"When large series of FACS results need to be analysed, capacity to run series
of analysis of FACS data fast."

"It is easy to get a significant amount of data in a short time.  I like the
output choices, the programming of the run to be able to assign different
gates for individual files, easy selection of the files to be processed."

"90% of usage is just to drag out medians and means very quickly.  It's fast. 
It gives the data in a table that we can quickly print using 4Print in
landscape mode which fits neatly in a work book."

MFI is available by BINARY anonymous ftp from flowcyt.bio.umass.edu in
/pub/flowcyt/mfi.  You should get two files: MFIZIP.EXE (the program itself),
and MFITUTOR.EXE (the tutorial with sample data files).  These are compressed,
self-unpacking files.  Look around, there's other good stuff there too!