Assessment of cotton fiber quality has undergone a significant change during the past several years. The older, traditional practice of assessing quality by color, trash and preparation has been progressively replaced by reliance on instruments that measure various physical properties of ginned lint that are not readily obtainable with hand classing. Today, cotton quality evaluation is widely based on the use of high volume instrumentation, or HVI, which is being increasingly adopted all the way from producers to textile manufacturers. In my opinion, high volume instrumentation is one of the most significant developments of recent decades in the technology of cotton development, production, marketing and utilization. HVI technology still is evolving, with expectations that components now being perfected will greatly strengthen the capabilities of HVI to precisely measure the physical properties of cotton that are important to textile processing.