One of the things that struck me when pulling apart the Chromium Controller was that it contain no components to directly monitor the droplet formation process. A cheap camera and optical system wouldn’t have added much to the BOM cost.
It would have been cool to watch the droplet formation process. But likely ultimately pointless and just another component to go wrong.
The BD Rhapsody however leans into imaging, providing an instrument which lets you image a flowcell and generate basic statistics on the the single cell prep:
While patents show some interesting metrics1, in the product it basically boils down to “PASS/FAIL”. You can also load a hemocytometer slide into the BD Rhapsody and generate other metrics prior to loading your cells… this gives you an opportunity to QC prior to loading.