[Myka]

Hach kits i'm talking about are awesome because they have a continuous gradient color wheel, plus the way you read it uses a sample of your water too to compensate for any color in the water itself kind of like the D-D Merck phosphate kit does, but better. Hach kits are all over $100, but some of them test for more than one parameter like the Nitrite/Nitrate kit, and are good for about 100 tests.

Hach also offer test strip kits, drop count titrator kits, digital drop count titrators, and color cube matching kits. These are all cheaper than the color wheel kits, but I'm not sure if they are any more accurate than Salifert or Elos, however they are still quite a bit pricier than Salifert and Elos. Maybe someone else knows their accuracy in comparison?

The Hach colorimeters run about $400. You have to buy one for each parameter, but the $400 includes the test kits which are good for about 100 tests.

Hach kits are laboratory grade, and usually used for environmental testing. Some kits read slightly different forms of each parameter than what we're used to or different units of measure. They have an Iron kit that is likely much more accurate than the notoriously inaccurate ones that offered in the reef industry.

An interesting note is that Hach offers a cyanide color wheel test kit, although I'm not sure that you would be able to detect cyanide in the bag water of a fish that was collected using cyanide. I would be very interested to find out though!

At the end of the day, even the best hobby grade test kits like Salifert and Elos are horribly inaccurate when compared to laboratory grade testing. D-D Merck and LaMotte's are just the beginning of accuracy in the hobby grade test kits.