The words ‘high-tech toaster’ are a surefire way to get everyone’s eyes rolling at Stuff, but once we got over ourselves a bit, Breville’s solution caught our attention. This isn’t a toaster stuffed with Wi-Fi or ChatGPT or something similar — the Breville Eye Q offers up the perfect slice of toast every time. That’s the idea, anyway.

Finding out Breville’s Eye Q

Companies can dress up their toasters as much as they like — they’re all still built on temperature sensors and timers like every other toaster for the last however many years. Except for the Breville Eye Q, which actually lays eyes on your toasty bread using a proprietary sensor that determines your breakfast’s readiness by colour.

“The Eye Q Optic Sensors track colour changes 10 times a second, stopping precisely at your chosen shade—so you’ll never need to watch your toast again,” the company wrote on the toaster’s webpage.

Users will get to choose from seven different shades of toast, ranging from slightly brown to “I swear I don’t smoke, Doc.” It’ll even accommodate a round of sourdough bread, which the company probably correctly assumes its customers eat on the regular, especially if they’ve got the dough necessary to house one of these badboys.

$470 (∼R8,160) is what it’ll cost to lay hands on a two-slice Breville Eye Q toaster (we shudder to think what a four-slice model would cost), which really makes us wonder if checking our own toast now and again is really such a raw deal. We reckon it won’t be long, however, before every other toaster brand dreams up their own ‘Eye Q’ solution and brings that price crashing down. For now, though, Breville sits atop the food chain.