AbstractThe electrical sensing zone technique is long established, well researched and widely used. It is often used as a reference method against which others are compared or calibrated. This position should not be allowed to disguise the potential which exists for still greater accuracy and versatility. In this paper the use of the hydrodynamic focussing technique is evaluated and an experimental comparison is made with a normal Coulter stand for several samples. It is clearly shown that hydrodynamic focussing enables higher resolution and accuracy to be obtained for materials with narrow or unusual particle size distributions.