Israeli high-tech company Sarine Technologies has developed new and groundbreaking technology that can instantly grade the clarity of polished diamonds.
In a statement released on Thursday, Sarine boasts that the machine will bring new standards to a painstaking process that has long been susceptible to the subjectivity of appraisers.
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Sarine Technologies Ltd. also said that its system, currently in commercialization testing stage in India, is expected to be marketed towards the middle of 2017. This technology “will revolutionize the global diamond industry by enhancing consumer trust in each diamond’s valuation, , ” the company announced.
Established in 1988, Sarine Technologies is well known in the diamond industry. The company spends $10 million a year on R&D. Its “Galaxy” machine is widely used by manufacturers to measure the inclusions in rough diamonds.
In 2014 Sarine Technologies Ltd signed a cooperation agreement with the luxury jewelry retailer Tiffany & Co. to develop a new automated system for the grading of a polished diamond’s symmetry linked to new standards to be set by Tiffany.
“In 2011, Tiffany posed Sarine with a challenge to measure the facet symmetry features of a polished diamond with unprecedented high accuracy. Previously these features could not be determined by any existing device and were manually evaluated by gemologists using microscopes.” the company announced .
This is how Sarine developed its well known DiaMension Axiom: A totally new solution for ascertaining a polished diamond’s proportions and symmetry and sets a new bar for polished diamond analysis and grading.
Sarine chief executive and executive director Uzi Levami said the system will simplify the clarity grading process and provide accurate and objective mapping of the polished diamond.
Within the assigned Clarity grade the diamonds are sorted into sub-categories according to pre-defined criteria, which enable diamond manufacturers and traders to ensure that each individual stone is optimally valued for its ideal sales market.
Levami said diamond dealers still need to provide other services, such as determining a diamond’s authenticity. “This will help people but not replace people. Instead of a human looking at the diamond from various angles, maybe the light is not so good, maybe he drank too much coffee, so he is making a mistake, ” he said. “The machine can “make the final decision for the grade of the diamond.”
Israel is a leading diamond polishing and trading center and was among the founders of the Kimberley Process—the global body responsible for ending the trade of “blood diamonds” that fund fighting across Africa. The Israel Diamond Institute claims to have the world’s largest diamond trading floor.
AP reported that Roland Lorie, chief executive of the International Gemological Institute, a global diamond certification body, inspected the new machine on Thursday.
He said it could help the industry as a time saver, but expressed doubt that it could give an accurate grading because there are so many tiny details to analyze.
“You need the brain of a person to identify what is more, what is better to see, what do you prefer to see, ” he said. “I think it will take a long, long time for a machine to be able to replace a human being.”
