Sarine Technologies Ltd  had announced late last year (in November 2016) that it had begun large scale testing of its new technologies for “the automated, objective and consistent grading of a polished diamond's Clarity and Colour grades”. Now, the largest manufacturer of technology solutions for the diamond industry says it has made “major progress” with the testing.

“The technologies have already achieved the ability to correctly and consistently match the grading opinion of a reference group of multiple human gemmologists, and the actual polished stone's gemmological lab report when available, within a grade’s accuracy, with 97% correlation for Clarity and 99% correlation for Colour,” Sarine reported. “These error rates, of 3% and 1% respectively, are in comparison to the current error rate of manual grading, which we have found to be in excess of 7% for Clarity and 3.5% for non-fluorescent Colour (Colour grading of fluorescent diamonds is substantially worse), based on statistical analyses of the manual grading reference group (Note: typically, 10% of Clarity grade results are contested).”

The Company says that this error margin is expected to be “further refined over time”; and it hopes to achieve an error rate for both Clarity and Colour which will ultimately be less than 1%.

“We remain on track for commercialisation in Q3 2017, with the formal launch scheduled for mid-September,” Sarine announced.

David Block, Chief Executive Officer of Sarine commented: "For the past 25 years, we have offered the wholesale and retail markets for polished diamonds value-added services, commencing with the ground-breaking introduction of automated Cut grading in 1992 and its subsequent industry-leading refinements.......The 21st century calls for 21st century technology, and we are at the forefront of providing the same to the retail diamond market.”