Dyson made a USD 499 toothbrush with a camera that flosses for you

In the realm of things that do not need a camera, a toothbrush must sit pretty high. But Dyson thinks not. Today, in Paris, James Dyson unveiled the Dyson CameraJet, an electric toothbrush with a camera mounted just below the brush head. It is Dyson’s first oral care product and it costs USD 499. That’s about KES 65,000 for a toothbrush.

What the camera is for

The camera is not for photos. Dyson calls it a 100k pixel macro lens, which is 0.1 megapixels, about one hundredth of a cheap phone’s selfie camera. It only needs to see the dark line where two teeth meet, leaving the rest to software.

Dyson says the camera will send 28 images a second to a system it calls Gap Optical Targeting, trained on 470,000 dental images collected during development. When it sees a gap, it fires a cone-shaped jet of mouthrinse at it within 100 milliseconds.

Dyson argues that this is for people who do not floss. For such people who have plaque forming first in the gaps, a brush that flosses on its own removes the need to floss. The company cites its own 2017 survey for the claim that nine in ten people floss less than they should.

The mouthrinse lives in a 12.5ml tank inside the handle, pressurised so it keeps firing when the brush is held sideways for the back teeth. A dock refills it in three seconds and charges the brush.

The camera also works as a live viewer. Open the MyDyson app and you get a feed from inside your own mouth. Dyson says the camera is only on during live viewing or auto-jetting, and that no images are recorded or stored on the brush or in the cloud.

There are the obvious issues when you think of this for a little longer. When brushing, your mouth foams. So a camera will be blocked by the foam. Not to worry, Dyson thought about it. So they’ll see you their own non-foaming paste. You also have to hold the brush horizontally and move it in slow ovals so the camera can see – too fast and it’s camera noise.

We are putting cameras everywhere

You’ve definitely seen viral TikTok clips of cameras in weird gadgets or accessories. Nowadays, placing a camera on something isn’t hard. They’re in spectacles, in drinking bottles, on vaccum robots and much more.

Apple is also putting cameras on the least expected place: AirPods. On the latest macOS 26.7 RC, a video from Apple shows Siri identifying a book through cameras in AirPods. Code in the same build points to two one-megapixel sensors that take stills, not video.

Apple has not announced the product. Its next event is on 9 September, which we covered when the invites went out, and it is the first under new chief executive John Ternus.