A $499 Dyson Toothbrush Becomes a Camera: Photographer Stages a Bizarre Street Shoot

A street photographer took a stroll through the city with Dyson’s new $499 CameraJet toothbrush, attempting to use the unusual gadget for something it was never designed to do — as a camera.

The device generated considerable buzz after its launch in early September. Dyson CameraJet has become part of a new trend in which cameras are being built into the most unexpected everyday objects.

The photographer, known on Instagram by the handle all gear no skill, decided to put the bizarre device to the test in real-world conditions and took it out to photograph the city streets.

“There’s a joke in the photography community that dentists own Leicas. So when I saw that Dyson had released a toothbrush with a camera, I knew I had to use it for street photography. It just seemed to make perfect sense,” she told PetaPixel.

She describes the resulting images as “completely weird.”

The camera inside the Dyson CameraJet is primarily designed for endoscopic images of teeth. According to the photographer, however, it behaves very differently in real-world street conditions.

“The camera needs a lot of light, but at the same time it doesn’t handle too much light very well. It was designed for macro photography and produces heavy fisheye-style distortion, while outdoors the images almost look like frames from an infrared camera. Of course, the resolution is low, and the colors and white balance are completely unpredictable,” she explained.

As a result, ordinary city scenes are transformed into surreal images: buildings bend and warp, light becomes excessively bright, and colors take on unusual shades.

The photographer has experimented with unconventional ways of shooting before. Among other projects, she has hand-colored photographs taken with a Leica M10 Monochrom and scanned thermal prints using a 150-megapixel Phase One camera.

“Photography should be fun,” she says.

During her walk, the unusual gadget attracted almost as much attention as the photographs themselves. The photographer said she received “quite a lot of strange looks” from passersby who noticed that she was photographing the streets with a toothbrush.

The Dyson CameraJet also has one significant limitation: the device does not save photos or videos on the toothbrush itself, nor does it upload them to the cloud. Images can only be viewed in real time through the accompanying app.

“There’s no recording function in the app, so I just took screenshots of my phone screen,” the photographer said.

The app itself, however, works surprisingly well, according to the photographer. It connects quickly, and image latency is minimal. “It’s funny that an app for a toothbrush provides a better experience than the apps from some camera manufacturers,” she joked.

The public, by and large, reacted positively to the experiment. According to the photographer, people were intrigued by the unusual images and compared them to the pictures generated by AI systems in the early 2020s.