At the forefront of modern X-ray structure work, the mar345 Image Plate Detector System offers you the best choice for recording diffraction patterns of small molecules as well as protein crystals. With its innovations in hardware design and software support it is the ideal detector for single crystal diffraction measurements of large and small molecules. Furthermore, it is a powerful tool for use in the fields of powder diffraction, texture analysis, small angle scattering and fiber diffraction. Since its introduction in early 1997 as the successor of the extremely popular mar scanners with 300mm and 180mm plates, the impact in the scientific community has been extraordinary. Close to 300 instruments have been installed by the end of 2004. Many of our detectors went to protein crystallography beamlines at synchrotrons around the world (Hamburg, Daresbury, Grenoble, Paris, Trieste, Brookhaven, Stanford, Brazil, China, etc.). As a consequence, many of the published high resolution protein structures are based on data collected with a mar scanner and our customer list reads like a "who's who" in crystallography.