A Toothbrush Has a Camera Now. We Are Not Buying It.

Somewhere in a Dyson lab, a team of engineers looked at the humble toothbrush — a device that has worked, more or less unchanged in concept, since boar bristles fell out of fashion — and asked: what if it had a camera. Not a metaphorical camera. An actual 100,000-pixel macro lens, scanning your teeth 28 times a second, feeding an AI system that spots the gaps you missed and automatically fires a precision jet of mouthrinse into them. This is real. It is called the CameraJet. It is launching in September. We need to talk about it.

THE PRODUCTWhat an S$699 toothbrush actually does

To be clear about something before we get too deep into the bit: the CameraJet is a genuinely impressive piece of engineering. A camera small enough to fit in a toothbrush head, fast enough to track motion at 28 frames a second, paired with AI that can identify gaps between teeth in real time and trigger a targeted spray — that's not a gimmick assembled from spare parts. Somebody solved a hard problem here. The question was never "can this be built." The question is "should the answer to inconsistent flossing cost this much and require its own proprietary toothpaste."

Because that's the catch: the camera works best with Dyson's own specially formulated non-foaming toothpaste and low-foaming mouthrinse. A regular foaming toothpaste, the kind sitting in basically every bathroom on Earth right now, would obscure the lens. So this isn't really a toothbrush upgrade. It's an onboarding into a Dyson oral-care ecosystem, camera included.

Sold as the "Dyson Dental System" — the brush, a charging dock, two heads, and a charging cable — it's positioned less like a toothbrush and more like a small appliance. Which, per Dyson's own numbers, is roughly the price bracket it's competing in.

THE GENREYou've met this gadget's cousins before

The CameraJet doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's the latest, most technically impressive entry in a genre we'd politely call "solved problems nobody was struggling with, now with a chip in it." You know the genre. The WiFi-connected kitchen gadget that needs an app just to tell you it's done. The juicer that costs more than a laptop, engineered to a tolerance so exact that reviewers eventually discovered you could squeeze the same juice out by hand, faster. The smart mug that keeps your coffee at a "perfect" temperature for a price that could buy a very good coffee maker and a normal mug with change left over.

Every generation of these products makes the same pitch: the old, boring version of this object has a flaw, and technology can fix it. Sometimes that's true — a smart thermostat learning your schedule saves real money. And sometimes the "flaw" being fixed is just "this object did not previously have a camera in it," which is not, on reflection, a flaw.

Somebody solved a hard problem here. The question is whether the problem needed solving.

THE VERDICTImpressive. Also, no.

Here's where we land, and it's less cynical than it probably sounds so far: the CameraJet is a real, clever, well-engineered product, and if the September pop-up demo genuinely changes how you brush and floss, that's a legitimate win worth paying for. We're not the flossing police. But it's also a useful reminder to sit with, every time a familiar object gets a camera, an app, or an AI bolted onto it: the upgrade is real, and so is the price of admission — sometimes literal, sometimes just the quiet tax of needing the "right" refill, the compatible app, the specific ecosystem, forever, to keep the thing working as advertised.

We'll let you know if we ever actually try it. Until then, we're brushing normally, flossing badly like everyone else, and watching this space — camera-free, for now.

This piece reflects DopamineKart's own commentary and opinion, based on publicly reported product details. It is not a paid partnership and does not constitute a product review or purchase recommendation. For a research-based, fact-first breakdown of the same product, see our Legit review.