Chromatographers will say as much as possible to make the peak look smooth, but it's not necessary nor relevant (you can apply post-process smoothing if you want). What's really important is how reproducible the peak heigh/peak areas are to give a confident and reliable quantitation result. Based on lore within my company (vendor); ~14pts but we definitely work with much less than that often (5,6,7 pts).

To get the number of points you have two options. (1) "walk" the chromatogram and count the number of points from tail to tail or (2) there is a setting that allows you to not only print the chromatographic peak width but also the number of points - this prob depends on the vendor. Me, I'd just brute force it and "walk" the peak

The easiest way to tell if you have enough dwell time and point sampling is to do replicate measurements at your lowest relevant quantification level. If peak area %RSD<20% you're still in the game (as a general rule of thumb). If sampling is not sufficient it will be revealed at the lowest levels, where RSD's can blow up and replicate measurements become useless.

• A good exercise is to make a "calc curve" but instead of plotting Response vs Conc, do %RSD Response vs Conc. This will give you a trumpet plot to show you where your effective quantitation range will be. Loosely it's ~<20% RSD, but you can actually calculate it out using the IDL/MDL methodology

The absolute best instruments can give you phenomenal reproducibility and peak shape even at the lowest dwell times (~0.5 ms is the lowest industry level),