The improved stage control can further speed up automated analyses by allowing the primary beam raster to be more tightly framed on a series of preselected targets, such as cells or particles. The analysis area has to be scaled based on the stage precision to ensure that selected targets are hit. The proportional increase in area directly translates to analysis time to collect sufficient ions from the target. The greatest improvement is for small targets (e.g., 1 m ), where the increase in analysis speed would be between 30 and 100 times, depending on whether one allows for 5-or 10-micron stage reproducibility with a NanoSIMS 50L (analysis time is proportional to the square of the target size + 2x stage reproducibility; Fig. ). For larger targets, the increase in analysis speed reduces geometrically down to 2 to 3 times for 30-micron diameter targets, which is still a significant time savings.