The tablet is the most commonly used dosage form (about 50 percent of all preparations and 75 percent of the solid forms). The characteristics of tablets depend on the production conditions used. The pioneer research that determined the compressional pressures applied on the powder bed was performed by Brake (1951) using an eccentric tablet press. Other research using an instrumented eccentric tablet press followed. Today, the use of an instrumented, single-punch or rotary tablet press is becoming the rule. Tablet press simulators are also used today. These machines are used in both the pharmaceutical industry and universities for developing compressed dosage forms and performing fundamental research. The cost of an instrumented eccentric tablet press is significantly lower than that of a rotary tablet press or a simulator. However, the physical conditions under which a tablet is formed with an eccentric tablet press are completely different from those of the rotary system; in addition to a difference in speed and dwell time, punch movements during compression are different for the two types of presses. Thus, it is difficult to predict the behavior of a powder under compression using a rotary tablet press or a simulator from the knowledge of its behavior when compressed with an instrumented eccentric tablet press. A wide variety of devices are used to convert tableting events into quantitative signals. These devices include strain gauges, piezoelectric load cells (force measurements), displacement transducers (traveling of the punches), and various thermometric systems (temperature variations of the powder bed in the die and of the die wall). Using the different theories attached to the physics of compression, the data obtained can be treated in many different ways to study fundamental phenomena and to solve development and production problems. Excellent books and reviews have been published on the types and placement of instrumentation and on the physics of compression. However, none has examined the subject comprehensively. In this review, the authors will discuss the technical aspects of eccentric tablet press instrumentation in relation to the fundamental notions of the physics of compression.