Recommended articles:

Article 1. A tale of three next generation sequencing platforms: comparison of Ion Torrent, Pacific Biosciences and Illumina MiSeq sequencers – Quail et al. 2012

This is an incredibly useful review about IonTorrent, Illumina and PacBio technologies. The paper was published in 2012, and contains valuable information about error rates, throughput. The article contains some information about pricing, which is kind of hard to come by, especially if you”re interested in more than one sequencing technologies.

Table 1. From Quail et al., 2012. Note the information about pricing.

Article 2. Comparison of Next-Generation Sequencing Systems – Liu et al. 2012

This one is probably even more useful. It contains information about Illumina HiSeq 2000 and MiSeq, SOLiD, Ion Torrent PGM and 454 sequencers. This article also contains some information about the per base cost of sequencing. It also gives some information about the softwares provided alongside with the sequencing machines.

Table 1 (a) from Liu et al., 2012. Note the accuracy values and disadvantages.