Although more sophisticated methods exist to visualize proteins after polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis the silver staining method (Blum et al. 1987) remains the method of choice in many laboratories. The level of protein expression is estimated to vary from 7 to 9 orders of magnitude. Though silver staing is one of the most sensitive methods to detect proteins it is known that the quantification is keenly restricted to a small range of protein concentrations. To ameliorate the efficiency of the silver stainging, a time-based analysis method (TBA) was developed to avoid saturation thus resulting in an improved dynamic range of the gel image produced. Instead of the well known end-point image analysis (digital image of one fixed staining stage), gray intensities of time series images of a developing gel are determined and times until a threshold gray value is reached are calculated. These times are assigned to produce a new grayscale image. The produced image provides the same resolution as conventional gel-images and can be quantified using commercial image processing software (e.g. Delta2D, Decodon, Germany). We are now developing an easy to use software tool to further evaluate the TBA method and to make it available for a routine use.