James Dyson Unveils a $500 Toothbrush, Complete With Camera and Mouth-Rinse Jet

James Dyson is probably the last great British inventor. Plenty of great engineers innovate in corporate research-and-development departments, solving problems great and small, but vanishingly few companies are led by people who just make creative new products, regardless of category. His company and its boffins have not only reinvented the modern vacuum — and used the same engineering in bladeless fans and hair care — but moved into everything from consumer electronics to high-tech strawberry farming. Many of those projects became outrageous financial successes. Yet Mr. Dyson seems like a man who wants to make a great product, whatever it costs, without the compromises others ordinarily accept. Even the failures — the unlaunched electric car or the flopped air-filtering headphones — were ambitious and impressive.And so, this morning, Dyson announced its latest invention, the CameraJet. It is a toothbrush, but unlike any made before: Sonic brushing combined with an onboard camera and a targeted mouth-rinse jet.It sounds complex — and it is certainly bulkier than a normal toothbrush — but promises to be relatively simple to use. Just brush your teeth as normal, and the camera watches them, spots interdental gaps, and triggers the jet as you move past. Dyson says the device can recognize a gap and fire a conical burst within 100 milliseconds. You can also stream the camera feed to your phone through the MyDyson app, making it easier to see missed spots. The camera activates only for automatic jetting or live viewing, and Dyson says neither the device nor the cloud stores the images.The handle carries enough mouth rinse for one session, but its charging dock has a larger reservoir that automatically refills the brush while charging it. That sounds handy, though I do worry about the long-term hygiene of water sitting in the dock. It might just have been simpler to refill the toothbrush itself — even if that made the handle even bulkier. Part of that heft, though, comes from the swappable battery, which is a great longevity feature.Over the past few years, companies have made endless questionable claims that their products are “powered by artificial intelligence,” just as they once slapped “smart” on everything. But Dyson developed a proprietary artificial-intelligence algorithm called Gap Optical Targeting, trained on 470,000 dental images gathered during six years of development.Beyond the fancy flossing feature, it appears to be an excellent toothbrush, too. The contoured head uses two types of bristles — one soft, one hard —to clean along the gumline and lift surface stains, and its variable sonic oscillation changes the brushing angle to stop bristles from stalling under pressure. Onboard sensors can flag poor technique and excess pressure, while radio-frequency identification tags track when the head needs replacing.That’s where the costs begin. The CameraJet works properly only with Dyson’s own heads, sold in two-packs for $29.99. Foam can obstruct the camera, so Dyson recommends mouth rinse and toothpaste without the foaming agent sodium lauryl sulfate, and will happily sell you its own nonfoaming toothpaste and low-foaming mouth rinse. And most importantly, the toothbrush itself costs $499.99.Courtesy of DysonThat price includes the refill dock, two regular brush heads, a charging cable, and a travel case, but it is an enormous sum for a brush. But Oral-B’s most advanced model costs $399.99 and it’s not nearly as inventive as this. And more importantly, if we didn’t have people like Mr. Dyson making no-compromise new takes on ordinary objects, the world would be a lot further behind and far more boring.

James Dyson Unveils a $500 Toothbrush, Complete With Camera and Mouth-Rinse Jet

James Dyson Unveils a $500 Toothbrush, Complete With Camera and Mouth-Rinse Jet

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