[Histonet] Cryostat Shopping

[Chris England]

Aloha Histonetters--I've missed you!

  1.  It's been a very long time since I last posted here so please forgive my heap of ignorance: I haven't done this in a hot minute.
  2.  I think I'm in the market for a cryostat! But it's been 20+ years since the last one I bought, and I have no clue what features I'll need now. Do I buy a reliable 90s analog model? Do I need digital control? No idea! I'd love to talk to sales reps to get the pitch...but because I'm most likely to buy a used model, I feel like I'd be wasting their time. So I thought I'd ask you fine people.

TL;DR: What features would you recommend are very useful for a cryostat for a low-volume research lab? And is it a bad idea to expect to do H&E and other stains on cryosectioned tissue?

To get the best advice, I'll try to anticipate some of the more likely questions and answer:
 "What do you want to do?"
Ideally, we'd like to do most of the same staining that one would do on FFPE tissue (H&E and some other stains) on fixed or unfixed frozen tissue. However more importantly I anticipate a lot of IHC/IF, and probably most important to us is preserving lipids in sectioned tissue (hence avoiding the clearing agents used with paraffin).
"What kind of tissue?" We're a tissue engineering company working extensively with mammary cells, so the workload will likely be fatty tissue, and some composite samples that are tissue and polymer scaffolds (nothing a good blade can't easily cut--I think).
"What volume?" Pretty low. I may well be underestimating the workload, but most likely a dozen blocks every few weeks.
"What budget?" That what I need help with. I can probably go up to $20k, and mgmt is OK with a new model if it's necessary, but frankly I wasn't fantastic on a cryostat the last time I bought one so I'm not confident I'm qualified to say what exactly we need.
"What is your skill level?" Noob. I've used a cryostat before, but my technique...definitely needs improvement. On the other hand, I'm the only one in my company that has any experience with histology at all, so I anticipate training a new generation of research histologists. So, I probably want a cryostat that may not do everything for me, but also won't require a lot of shoehorning.

I'll also leave a more open question down here: What is a paraffin microtome better suited to than a cryostat, and vice-versa?

Thank you so, so much in advance for your time and any help you can offer!!!

Warmest regards and aloha,
Jack England