Why does an intensity calibration of the gel cartridge for the QIAxcel System and QIAxcel Advanced need to be performed?

The intensity calibration procedure on the QIAxcel System and QIAxcel Advanced is performed to normalize the signal intensities across all 12 channels of the gel cartridge. This corrects for natural intensity reading variations between each capillary in the cartridge. A correction factor is determined and applied for every subsequent run performed with the cartridge.