Sarine Technologies’ new automated color- and clarity-grading systems are yielding more reliable results than manual graders, the company has claimed.
Sarine Clarity, which uses technology to analyze flaws in polished diamonds, showed a 97% correlation with the grades given by a reference group of human gemologists, while Sarine Color matched them 99% of the time, Sarine said Sunday.
The company found that humans tended to give a wider range of grades for an individual diamond than the technology did. Sarine based its accuracy rates on the distribution of those grades. For the reference group, it chose gemologists who had all worked at the same laboratory, and every time two or more of them gave a diamond a score that was more than one grade off the average, researchers recorded an “error,” explained Roni Ben-Ari, Sarine’s vice president for products.
Such errors occurred with human-graded stones 7% of the time when it came to clarity and 3.5% for color, if the diamond was not fluorescent, according to the company.
Manual graders get the color wrong even more often when diamonds are fluorescent, Sarine asserted. In addition, about 10% of clarity-grade results are disputed, it said.
