Dyson Put a Camera Inside a $500 Toothbrush

Dyson spent six years building a toothbrush that can see inside your mouth. The CameraJet is up for pre-order now at $499.99 in Ceramic Ultra Blue and Ceramic Pink, and it ships September 8. It brushes, flosses and rinses in one pass. The seeing part is the whole pitch. A camera under the brush head finds the gaps between your teeth and fires water at them, so you never have to aim.

That is either the most Dyson product ever made or five hundred dollars for a toothbrush. Both are true.

What the camera actually does

It is a 100,000 pixel macro lens. That is not many pixels, but it does not need many. It is looking at one thing, from about a centimeter away, in the dark, with its own light. Dyson paired it with a machine learning model trained on 470,000 dental images, and the system reads 28 live images per second to find the gaps between teeth and target them in real time. Dyson says it responds within 100 milliseconds of spotting one. You move the brush, it sees a gap, it jets.

The plumbing might be the harder problem. A toothbrush gets held at every angle a wrist can manage, including upside down, and water does not care about your brushing technique. So Dyson built a diaphragm pump and a pressure chamber that adapt while you use it, keeping the jet controlled at any orientation. That is a lot of engineering for a small squirt of water, which is roughly the company's entire personality.

The 12.5ml question

The tank holds 12.5ml. That is about two and a half teaspoons, and if you are jetting every gap in a full set of teeth, one fill may not cover a whole session. Dyson's answer is the dock, which holds a bigger reservoir and refills the tank in about three seconds. That works, but it also means the routine may involve a trip back to the counter partway through. Whether that reads as a two-second pause or a daily annoyance is the sort of thing you only learn after a few weeks with it.

A camera in your bathroom

A connected camera pointed inside your body is a reasonable thing to be nervous about, and Dyson got ahead of it. The company says no images are recorded or stored, not on the product and not in the cloud. An LED tells you when the camera is on. The MyDyson app gives you a live view while you brush, feedback on your technique, and control over brushing intensity and jetting modes, and Dyson says the images are deleted as soon as you have looked at them.

That is the right call. It is also unverifiable from outside the company. We are taking Dyson's word for it, the same way we take every connected hardware company's word for it, and that is the trade you accept when the thing joins your Wi-Fi.

The rest of it

The brush head uses two kinds of bristle: softer ones on the outside for the gumline, firmer ones on the inside for surface stains. An RFID tag in the head tracks how much you have used it and tells the app when to swap it, which is genuinely useful and also a subscription-shaped nudge. Dyson quotes up to 10 days of battery per charge, and the battery is swappable. In the box: the refill dock, a charging cable, two brush heads and a travel case.

Who is this for

If you already floss every night, you do not need a camera to tell you where your teeth are. The CameraJet is for the person who does not floss, or does it badly, and has heard about it from a dentist twice now, and would rather buy the problem away than build the habit. Dyson has made a very good business out of that person.

No camera is going to make you brush for the full two minutes if you were not going to. But Dyson keeps putting motors and sensors into objects nobody asked it to reconsider, and the bladeless fan and the hair dryer both sounded ridiculous first. This one has to make that case at $499.99, starting September 8.