Cut/Color/Carat...where''s the balance

[UGACHL]

Hello All,

Ive been giving more sway to "cut" quality, but dont know on compromising carat/color sizes. Just looking for opinions on these:

http://www.dirtcheapdiamonds.com/diamond_detail.cfm?did=3099755

http://www.whiteflash.com/round_ideal_cut/Round-Ideal-Cut-cut-diamond-695991.htm

http://www.dirtcheapdiamonds.com/diamond_detail.cfm?did=2746263

Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[Regular Guy]

It''s still a learning process for me. On the one hand, I''m sympathetic to the theory I''ve presented myself...that with table and depth data in hand, consistent with what seems to pass for good enough info for most jewelers, you can make a good enough judgement about most diamonds.

On the other hand, until I have more experience to go against what I''ve affirmatively learned here, I''d say that with the options you''ve suggested above, if you plug a range of .90 to 1.05 for carat weight into the search by cut quality search routine here, leaving the range of D - E for color and SI 1 for clarity, it would seem with your first choice from White Flash, you''ve optimized, and by some $1500. On the other hand, this ignores the two other options you''d found, and which the search by cut quality search engine doesn''t pick up, because that crown & pavillion data is missing. Perhaps you can push the envelope and ask Jim at DCD if he can get that data for you, so you can compare apples to apples.

Best wishes,

 

[Garry H (Cut Nut)]

Better yet - if you can compare ideal-scope images - they are better final aribiters.
HCA is great for rejecting known bad stones - but should not be used for ''selectiong''.

Even if Jim can get you a verbal opinion of an ideal-scope image.

 

[valeria101]

Date: 11/17/2004 2:16:43 AM
Author: Regular Guy
I''m sympathetic to the theory I''ve presented myself...that with table and depth data in hand, consistent with what seems to pass for good enough info for most jewelers,

Well, I am not sure about this. Aside this info on the cert, they SEE the diamonds and have a TON more experience on what to look for. The GIA cert may be suficient as sales instrument, but I bet it ain''t as a buying one for the retailers... Surely jewelers look at stones and pay according to what they see. They have their experience, and us... a computer screen

Besides, look at those prices. If GIA stats would be enough, why on Earth do you have 100% price variation from one stone to the other? With that range at hand, I would not jump to the conclusion that it is all in the shops'' premiums and nothing about untold quality details. This would be insulting to the sellers to assume, and then... it is just the price range for a set of stats, not for each stone that goes heywire. So whoever makes the price DOES evaluate consistently some other aspects of qualty: brilliance, eye clean clarity for SIs, fluorescence, size for weight - are all accounted by both testimonies here and by price stats. Do would anyone tel you all this? Only if you ask

Hope some of this makes sense...

 

[Regular Guy]

with some regrets to UGACHL (you did get my 2 cents, which I''ll add to here), and not wanting to hijack this thread, this is a bit juicy....

Ana says:

"they SEE the diamonds and have a TON more experience on what to look for. The GIA cert may be suficient as sales instrument, but I bet it ain''t as a buying one for the retailers... Surely jewelers look at stones and pay according to what they see. They have their experience, and us... a computer screen..."

a few thoughts...

1) first of all, who is "they." And consequently, what is the deliverable, in terms of the information sought by the shopper...in this case, UGACHL. Although some actuals were looked at by somebody, and this helped to set the price (your point)... going back to Garry''s suggestion that an idealscope get in hand, I think there would be cost based procedures for making this happen which will have their own consequences, at least for DCD. I willingly did buy my diamond from Jim, understanding it would be called in, and figuring out in process that crown and pavillion angles would be forthcoming, and in fact were in place before we agreed I''d come and look at it. I think and hope Jim, without spending a dime, could get those same crown & pavillion angles from the current host of the diamond, but I''m guessing that asking for an idealscope may be over the top. But these are sort of givens....right? White flash also makes some diamonds available at a distance....the one in consideration right now is in hand, however, and so the idealscope image is in hand, now. Of course, the Forbes article Leonid pointed out touches on all this, too.

2) Is there any "arbitrage" to be had, or is pricing purely a consequence of the open market, such that you can bet pricing, all things being equal (DCD & Whiteflash both pricing diamonds with reference to the same market basket and such), will be consistent with what you end up getting. To a certain extent. I''m thinking that jewelers play this game each time they bring a diamond "in house," rather than leaving it "out there" in the database of diamonds, ready to be available. To perhaps a smaller extent, where there is variance between AGS standards and the results of HCA analysis, I think the shopper can benefit.

3) What expertise should we bestow upon Jewelers, altogether. Really, based on what I''ve learned so far, unless they do become technology savvy, and since I don''t think most use an idealscope, apart from reading the same charts for table and depth data we all can see here, as you say, Ana, the eyeballing they must do is something I''m simply curious about. To say one has a trusted Jeweler, and to not understand they''ve first consulted their sarin data, is -- to me -- to say that they have a good and kind bed side manner, kinda like diamonds, and may have a slightly better eye to these things than I do, but not to the extent that I would turn over my decision making powers to them.

In the DC area, Washington Diamond has a sarin machine, and Charleston Alexander is supposed to as well, and supposedly will have a tunk show the first weekend in December, and I may go there, if I can figure out some plausible method for not burdening my wife more by leaving the kids than I''d actually benefit her by giving her -- at this point -- a rather modest gift (I bought my replacement e-ring this past summer, and can''t really rationally explain why I still linger, except that I continue to be engaged here, nonetheless).

Just some further thoughts about cut quality. With best wishes,

 

[valeria101]

Date: 11/17/2004 2:264 PM
Author: Regular Guy

Ana says: ''They have their experience, and us... a computer screen...''

a few thoughts...

1) first of all, who is ''they.[...] Ana, the eyeballing they must do is something I''m simply curious about.

Well... "they" would be professional diamond buyers. The type of retailer that would buy diamonds for their stock based on what they think looks good and is sellable by obvious visual appeal.

I have two reasons to imply that "experience" (= critical judgement based on visual memory of hundreds of diamonds, nothing else) is different and better than "computer screen" (= lots of technical detail, but very limited experience):

For once, models are not perfect - there is always a limit to what a model can convey about it''s subject. The very opperation of analysis prior to modeling limits tremendously (if not supresses) the possibility to discover new details and build a personal impression on the subject, different than what the maker of the model had in mind.

And second, it seems to take quite a bit of time, attention and technical inclination to read through the various ways of presenting diamonds online. And much as I''d wish for the contrary, virtually no method conveys anything close to the visual impression of these stones.

All in all, I did not have a drop ship operation in mind. Even then, I would sincerely expect anyone with the above-mentioned type of experience to outrun guessing by some basic rule of thumb (remember that "table < depth" ?) and GIA stats alone.

 

[Regular Guy]

Appreciate your reply, Ana; it appears we are perhaps talking, then, at cross purposes, and not in disagreement. In fact, upon first seeing your tag line, " ''The greatest experts are only as good as the sum total of what they have seen.'' [Souren Melikian]," I thought that was quite thoughtful.

In the case of this thread, and the originator of it...UGACHL apparently used some criteria to identify these 3 diamonds to compare, and it looks like 2 of them are from virtual lists, both DCDs at this point. And, so, unless we have our wires crossed, where you say above: "...The type of retailer that would buy diamonds for their stock based on what they think looks good...," that simply doesn''t apply to the circumstance at hand. They''ve not been chosen by a retailer for their stock, but have been identified from a list, made available through, in this case, DCD.

Otherwise, the theory, as originally presented by me above ("with table and depth data in hand, consistent with what seems to pass for good enough info for most jewelers, you can make a good enough judgement about most diamonds...") while being reaffirmed here at point #3, I really do just put it up as a paper tiger, and that is the point I originally tried to make, I think....probably without the success I intended.

Thanks,