A small range of new commercially available chelating resins are compared with a resin prepared in-house in terms of their applicability for on-line preconcentration and matrix separation. The flow injection manifold was designed for rapid matrix separation and the resins were tested for the determination of CuII, ZnII, CdII, MnII and NiII. The resin based on controlled pore glass was found to be better for this rapid procedure because it did not require conditioning, although the polymer based resins had better capacities. The commercially available controlled pore glass based iminodiacetate (IDA) resin had a comparable performance to the in-house controlled pore glass 8-hydroxyquinoline (CPG-8-HQ) resin. The IDA resin had a much higher capacity than the 8-HQ, however as with all IDA based resins, some retention of CaII was observed. The sample throughput was 12 h - 1 .