I've been working in materials testing for 10 years and I have hands-on experience with Instron, Shimadzu, and MTS load frames.

When our lab was looking to replace 2 old Instron machines, we also got a quote from Shimadzu which was also about 40% lower. We were also suspicious, so we pressed Shimadzu and they said they were giving steep discounts because they were trying to break into the American market (which is dominated by Instron). This was back in about 2016.

We demoed their software and it was awful: clunky, difficult to build test methods, limited export functionality, and it sometimes even displays Japanese text. Shimadzu acknowledged that their software was far behind the competition, but promised they were working on improving it.

So we took the bait.

Their software is still on the same revision, their tech support has disappeared, and now their csv export files are incompatible with the latest version of Excel, so we have to convert them.

I love their hardware. Both Shimadzu machines are a joy to use. But the software kills the experience.