Sooner or later any of us might meet an NIR-sceptic person, sometimes with very strong chemical and analytical background, who has strict concerns about NIR spectroscopy, because it is – as such people argue – not a classical analytical technique, regarded as a secondary correlative tool and gives unreliable data that can be nicely studied with questionable methods, and finally, after involving hardly understandable mathematics, something nice comes out – but this is still not analytics. We are not willing to focus on the fact that with some extra hours even the “hardly understandable mathematics” could be comprehended, but to give some hints for the newcomers how to highlight the very powerful benefits of NIR that may also draw the attention on some of the weaknesses of chemical analytical techniques, thus, how NIR can help classical analytics.
Checking the laboratory reference values with NIR calibrations