The first time you try Breville’s new high-tech toaster, do it in the dark. Along with the subtle green lights on the front face and the mellow orange glow of the wires, what will be impossible to miss are the rapidly blinking laser-green lights emanating from the left slot, disco dance style.

Behold! The Breville Eye Q toaster, which instead of using a traditional toaster timer, uses optic sensors to scan your toast 10 times a second, the company says. The toaster uses the green blinking lights to monitor the doneness of your toast as it toasts, bringing the proceedings to a halt as soon as the results are right where you’ve indicated you want them.

This means the toaster looks at your bread as it arrives in the slot, then toasts it to shades that are darker than that. (Curiously, Breville divides the doneness settings into seven progressively darker shades. Perhaps it’s not 10 shades because everything past seven is just progressive shades of burnt?)

As we further explore this curious appliance, temporarily suppress the urge to say this is too much tech for toast, and appreciate that it’s pretty impressive Breville has figured out how to cook this way.

Courtesy of Breville

If, by chance, you’ve used a toaster before, you’ll find the design of the $300 Breville Eye Q 850 Auto 2 Slice and its $400 four-slot sibling easy to understand. Press the big button on the front and the bread glides down into the slots. (You know, just push down the lever and the wires get hot.) Buttons on the left and right adjust between doneness levels. If the toast comes up lighter than you were anticipating, Breville’s now classic “A bit more” button will make it a little darker for you. Depending on where you live in the world, there’s a bagel or crumpet setting; just make sure the toasting faces point outward so the sensors are looking at the correct side.

By holding the start/stop button for two seconds before toasting, you can trigger sourdough mode, which stops the toasting when the center of the bread is a little lighter than it would be in regular toast mode. This is designed to keep the sourdough edges, which are more prone to burning, from doing so. Press the button twice quickly and it goes into old-fashioned timer mode, which Breville suggests for treats like Pop-Tarts and frozen waffles.

Speaking of frozen, there’s no button for that. The sensors don’t care if your toastable is frozen or not; it just toasts until it reaches the desired darkness, same as it would on regular toast. It’ll take a little longer, but as far as the toaster’s concerned, the end goal is the same.

Along with Breville’s perfect looped plug, which makes plugging and unplugging a breeze and saves wear and tear on your cord, there are two particularly nice bits of design here. First is how the power cord tucks into the back of the unit, helping keep your countertop nice and neat—no Room Rater cord violations here! Second is a pleasingly capacious, easy-to-use crumb tray. Charmingly, the schematic block diagram and abstract used in Breville’s US patent application are etched into the bottom of the crumb tray, an Easter egg for the optic-sensor set.

It comes in two-slice and four-slice versions.

Courtesy of Breville

It’s also pretty good looking as countertop appliances go, a bar that Breville’s products tend to clear easily. The “dark noir” brushed steel is handsome, the controls intuitive, and the ceramic-coated top is clean and will likely stay that way over time, more so than a traditional stainless top.

Over the summer, I brought the Eye Q along for a couple of weeks of family time in New Hampshire, where we were often eight or more around the table, tweens to octogenarians. Most everyone was intrigued by the toaster, and encouragingly, nobody needed coaching on how to use it.

During the months I had it, it almost always did an acceptable job. It wasn’t hard to get the toast right, but—and this is a big but—compared to a regular toaster, the quality of the toast it made was comparable, not superior. To generalize, especially if you compared front to back on a slice, or piece to piece, the Eye Q’s toasting was a little uneven and the top of the toast tended to come out darker than the bottom. A noticeable thing, but nothing a polite person would complain about if you set a couple buttery slices in front of them.

On BLT day, I took my nephew Eli on as intern for the afternoon and had him toast seven consecutively darker batches of toast, one per setting, then line them up in order on a sheet pan. The lowest setting was very light, settings two and three were pretty identical, settings four and five were excellent, setting six was mysteriously lighter than setting four, and setting seven was very dark and a little burnt. Two-slot toasters aren’t designed for seven back-to-back cycles of toasting, but it did well enough. Store-bought bagels didn’t fare particularly well.

Back in Seattle, I unpacked a new Eye Q, and that one had a bad habit of making lighter shades darker than most people would appreciate, so Breville sent another one along to close out the testing. It worked fine, though it tended to get the edges a little toastier than the center; this seemed to be getting worse as testing wound down, so if you’re thinking about buying one of these, perhaps watch the comments for a couple months before pulling the trigger.

Without boring you to death, toasters—even good ones—struggle to toast bread evenly. As I said back in 2016, the toaster industry is kind of a crap shoot, and even if you spend a lot of money, it’s not a guarantee you’re going to get the highest quality. Little has changed since then. My fellow toast nerds over at America’s Test Kitchen also love to rate toasters, and even in 2026, no toaster, no matter what the cost, gets their Highly Recommended rating. Breville’s toasters, which are among ATK’s small handful of Recommended favorites, are noted for struggling to toast evenly, more or less like the rest of the competition. When I’ve had Breville’s toasters in my test kitchen in the past, I’ve enjoyed them but had similarly sorta-splotchy results.

Courtesy of Breville

At the end of testing, I wished that instead of figuring out an impressive new way to determine when your toast is done, Breville had worked on building a toaster that toasts nicely, evenly, and predictably. Paying $300 for a two-slot toaster that doesn’t get you there kinda stings.

The Eye Q’s most interesting potential might not have anything directly to do with making toast. It’s the tech. It’s very easy to make the mental jump to transfer the optical sensor technology to other Breville appliances. My wife Elisabeth imagined out loud how it could help you dial in perfect skin on a roast chicken. Back in 2022, I reviewed Breville’s fancy toaster oven, the Joule Oven Air Fryer Pro, and it’s easy to imagine a future version with a probe thermometer that, combined with Eye Q-esque tech, could monitor the bird inside and out, allowing you to finesse the cooking, or even do it for you.

It could, say, drop the heat at the end once the skin was dark enough, allowing it to cruise to a finish without scorching. Or, if the inside was close to done, it could give the exterior a quick browning blast, maybe even flipping on extra elements or turning up the fans to brown quickly without drying out the interior.

There are so many toasters out there, particularly at the junky end, that just finding one that toasts well and fits your budget is work. Good ones are out there, though. If you’d like something tech-centric and beautiful, try the Balmuda. On the analog end, Elisabeth and I got a Cuisinart 4-Slice Metal Classic Toaster as a wedding present in 2012 which has all the controls you need and a dial for doneness. It now costs around $70 new, and while ours is starting to fade, and I keep thinking I should replace it, it’s still chugging along.

Courtesy of Breville

We like the four-slot for the two of us, which gives us two slices each at our preferred donenesses at more or less the same time. She butters the toast while I finish the eggs, and breakfast is served. Sure, we’ve burned some toast a few times over the years, but really, you just get used to how it performs and adjust the regular ol’ dial to suit your taste and hit the cancel button if there’s a wisp of smoke.

So as I sat there, writing my longhand rough draft and staring at the Eye Q, I wondered how to score this thing fairly. I appreciated its not-too-flashy good looks and the fine toast it often made and I thought, If this were the last toaster I owned, I’d be pretty happy. But on the last day I had it, I popped some sourdough in there on a light setting, made sure it was on sourdough mode, and hit start. What emerged was toasty enough around the outside that it sent up little wisps of smoke. At that point I was ready to haul my 14-year old beauty out from its temporary storage spot under my workbench and be happy with that too.