Dyson CameraJet Hits the Sidewalk, Street Photos From a $499 Toothbrush

A street photographer spent a recent afternoon walking city blocks with Dyson’s new CameraJet pressed against her face, treating a $499 electric toothbrush as if it belonged in a camera bag. She goes by all gear no skill on Instagram and has a habit of forcing odd tools into photo walks. Dentists owning Leicas is an old running joke in that circle, so a toothbrush that already carries a camera felt like the next logical dare. Photography should be fun, she said, and she meant it enough to stand on a sidewalk holding oral-care hardware while strangers stared.

Dyson released the CameraJet in early September as an electric toothbrush with a 100,000-pixel macro camera hidden beneath the bristles. The minuscule sensor is constantly on the watch for any gaps between teeth, shooting a photo 28 times per second, and as soon as it discovers one, a little conical burst of mouthwash is released. You may also stream live video of your mouth to the MyDyson app over Wi-Fi, allowing you to monitor your own fresh breath in real time. None of this is saved on the handle or communicated to any server. All you get is a live stream on your phone’s screen, with no button to save a frame as you walk.

There was no record button to use. The entire stream was simply a succession of screenshots from that phone feed, but to her amazement, the program itself loaded rapidly and barely lagged slightly, which was more than some camera business software we’d used. The resolution was low, the colors and white balance were off, and the lens exhibited significant fisheye distortion. When she took it outside, the same sensor that requires a lot of light to take a nice image folded under too much light, transforming daylight scenes into something resembling infrared. There was an odd pink hue going on, but faces were still recognizable enough to pick people out of a throng, which was more than it was designed to achieve.

Many passers-by gave her long, hard looks as she was using the CameraJet, and she ended up with a series of frames that she subsequently described as simply bizarre. Viewers who saw them compared them to the first generative photos from a few years ago and largely loved the oddity. However, one subreddit is not doing so well. The moderators of r/streetphoto ended up removing the post because it violated a guideline requiring the photos to be taken with a’street photography only’ camera. Even after she explained the whole toothbrush-on-the-street thing, they refused to put it back up, claiming it didn’t count as street photography.

She’s already planning to use a Leica the next time around. The CameraJet experiment is still active as a public test of what happens when you put a gadget designed for cleaning teeth in the middle of the street, including pavement, stores, and passers-by who happen to glance twice at a person brushing their teeth.
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