We present a novel chamber design for measuring soil–atmosphere N₂O fluxes and compare the performance of a commonly applied gas chromatography (GC) setup with laser-based (QCL) concentration detection. While GC was still a useful method for longer-term investigations, we found that closure times of 10 min and sampling every 5 s is sufficient when using a QCL system. Further, extremely low standard errors (< 2 % of flux value) were observed regardless of linear or exponential flux calculation.