Comment Illumina is almost a monolist (Score 2) 32
Illumina almost owns the next-generation sequencing market and can basically ask anything for their machines and more importantly the consumables.
I've been working with their machines for almost 15 years and it's always the same story. Yes the newer machines (which come at a pretty hefty price) have lower costs per base, but only when combined with increased throughput. We don't all need 20K genomes per year. We want cheaper sequencing for smaller labs/projects.