BGI / CompleteGenomics just released the Revolocity sequencing platform.
See http://www.completegenomics.com/revolocity/ and this news article and blog post
The selling points are that it offers and end to end solution, from sample to VCF file (gVCF?) and can sequence a comparable amount of samples as the x10. Nice if you are happy doing exactly what BGI offers, not so much if you want more flexibility.
What really surprised me though is that the read length is 28 bp paired end. That is 5 x less compared to 150bp on the x10. Surely this affects the mapping quality of the reads and the type and quality of variant calls you can make.
We recently used CG platform to perform Exome sequencing on couple of samples. As you mentioned read length is very short (varies between 19-28). Even though coverage we got is huge (more than a billion reads per sample !), around 20% of them were MQ < 10. Also downstream analysis such as variant calling is a lot trickier at this read length and contains lot of variants, most of them are what appears to be false positives.
Are CG reads still like the old ones, with 3 unknown gaps or overlaps between four 7-8bp segments? That was the worst part of CG data. I am very impressed by CG developers in that they could get pretty good results given such difficult raw data. They have done a great job.
Should this be a Forum post instead?
I'd think so, I've moved it accordingly.