Street Photographer Shoots Lo-Fi Images With Dyson's $500 Camera Toothbrush

Dyson launched the CameraJet at the beginning of September, and TechRadar describes it as the company's first foray into oral care, priced at $499.99 / £419.99 / AU$799. Tucked just below the brush head is a 100,000-pixel (0.1MP) macro camera that feeds a machine learning system Dyson calls Gap Optical Targeting. That system analyzes video at 28 frames per second to locate the gaps between a user's teeth, then fires a cone-shaped jet of mouth rinse at each one, so the user is effectively flossing while brushing.

The same sensor doubles as a dental endoscope, streaming a live view of the user's molars to the MyDyson app. In her review of the CameraJet, TechRadar writer Emily Peck found that view can be "a little more revealing than you might like." That live feed is also the only way to take a picture with the brush. Dyson says the CameraJet does not save images on the device or in the cloud, and the app has no capture button, so the creator pointed the brush head at a subject, watched the feed on a phone and took a screenshot when the composition looked right. TechRadar described the process as a $500 remote viewfinder with bristles.

The results carry the signature of a sensor built to inspect incisors from a few millimeters away. The macro lens bends scenes into a fisheye-style bubble, 100,000 pixels amounts to 0.1 megapixels of resolution, and color and white balance drift unpredictably, giving the photographs what TechRadar calls an almost infrared look. The publication compared them to the hallucinatory AI-generated images that circulated a few years ago, citing the widely shared clip of Will Smith eating spaghetti.

The CameraJet is unlikely to be the last unlikely device used this way, TechRadar noted, because cameras are appearing in products that have nothing to do with photography. Cars carry several for parking and driver assistance, robot vacuums use them to dodge children's toys and charging cables, and some smart fridges and ovens let owners check what is inside from a phone. Robot lawn mowers and VR headsets are equipped with them as well. Many of those devices offer a live feed in a companion app, which TechRadar characterized as a house full of accidental point-and-shoots waiting for someone with a sense of humor.