Review: Breville Eye Q Toaster Has Clean Sensors, but Toast Falls Short of Ideal

The Breville Eye Q uses optical sensors to measure how dark toast is. The technology is interesting, but toasting quality needs improvement.

The new Broil toaster uses light sensors to measure the darkness of your toast. Interesting technology, but roasting quality needs improvement.

A good-looking toaster with great technology that helps it determine when your toast is done. A wide range of settings, with special functions for sweet and sourdough bread. Available in two-slot and four-slot models.

At $300 for the cheapest version, roasting quality should be better than the competition, and it isn't.

The first time you try your new Broil toaster, do it in the dark. Along with the subtle green lights on the front and the soft orange glow of the wires, what can't be missed are the fast-blinking green laser lights emanating from the left slot, disco-style.

Look! Instead of using a traditional toaster timer, the Breville Eye Q toaster uses light sensors to scan your toast 10 times per second, according to the company. The toaster uses flashing green lights to monitor the readiness of your toast while toasting, stopping the process as soon as the results are right where you indicated you want them.

This means that the toaster looks at the crack as your bread comes in, then toasts it to a darker color than that. (Strangely enough, Breville divides the prep settings into seven darker shades. Maybe not 10, since anything past the last seven is just gradual burnt shades?)

As we explore more of this curious device, temporarily suppress the urge to say that this technology is too much for toast and appreciate that it's pretty impressive that Breville figured out how to cook this way.

If you happen to have used a toaster before, you'll understand the design of the $300 Breville Eye Q 850 Auto 2 Slice and its $400 four-slice sibling. Press the big button on the front and the bread will slide into the slots. (You know, just push the lever and the wires heat up.) The left and right buttons adjust between readiness levels. If the toast looks lighter than you anticipated, the classic broil button will now darken it a bit more for you. Depending on where you live in the world, there's a sweet or sour environment. Just make sure the toasted faces are facing out so the sensors are facing the right way.

By holding the start/stop button for two seconds before toasting, you can activate the yeast mode, which stops toasting when the center of the bread is slightly lighter than normal toast. This is designed to keep the edges of the sourdough, which are more prone to burning, out of the way. Press the button twice quickly and it goes into old-timer mode, which Broil recommends for treats like pop tarts and frozen waffles.

Speaking of Freeze, there is no button for it. The sensors don't care if your toast is frozen or not. It's just toasted until it reaches the desired darkness, like regular toast. It takes a little longer, but as far as the toaster is concerned, the end goal is the same.

Along with Broville's perfect looped plug, which makes it easy to plug in and out and reduces wear and tear on your cord, there are two very nice pieces of design here. First is how the power cord runs behind the device, helping you keep your desk nice and tidy—no room-rating cord violations here! Second, the crumb tray is very large and easy to use. Amazingly, 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 optical sensor array.

It also looks great with appliances, a strip that Broil products tend to wipe off easily. The "dark noir" brushed steel is beautiful, the controls are intuitive, and the ceramic-coated top is clean and likely to stay that way over time, longer than a traditional stainless top.

Over the summer, I brought Eye Q with me for a few weeks of family time in New Hampshire, where there were often eight or more of us around the table, between the ages of two and eight. Most people were fascinated by the toaster and, encouragingly, no one needed training on how to use it.

In the months I've had it, it's almost always worked reasonably well. It wasn't difficult to make the toast, 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 do the front on a slice, or slice by slice, the Eye Q's toasting was a bit uneven and the top of the toast tended to come out darker than the bottom. It's a big deal, but if you put a wedge of butter in front of them, a polite person won't complain.

On BLT day, I hired my nephew Eli as an intern for the afternoon and had him toast seven batches of darker toast in succession, one per setting, then arrange them in order on a pan. The lowest setting was too bright, settings two and three were about the same, settings four and five were great, setting six was mysteriously lighter than setting four, and setting seven was very dark and slightly burnt. Dual-slot toasters aren't designed for seven consecutive toasting cycles, but they did well enough. The store-bought pastries were not very well priced.

In Seattle, I opened a new Eye Q, and that one had a nasty habit of making lighter shades darker than most people like, so Breville sent another one to finish the experiment. It worked well, although the edges were a bit toastier than the center. It seemed to get worse as the trial wore off, so if you're thinking of buying one of these, maybe watch the reviews for a few months before pulling the trigger.

Without boring you to death, toasters — even good ones — struggle to toast bread evenly. As I said in 2016, the toaster industry is kind of a crap game, and even if you spend a lot of money, there's no guarantee you'll get the highest quality. Little has changed since then. My toast friends at America's Test Kitchen also like to rate toasters, and even in 2026, no toaster, regardless of cost, will receive its highly recommended rating. Broil toasters, among a handful of ATK favorites, are known for struggling to toast evenly, more or less like the rest of the competition. When I had Broville toasters in my test kitchen in the past, I enjoyed them but had similar results.

At the end of the experiment, I wished that instead of discovering a new and effective method of timing the test, Broil had worked on making a toaster that toasted well, evenly, and predictably. Paying $300 for a two-slot toaster that won't get you anywhere stings a bit.

Eye Q's most interesting potential may not be directly related to making toast. This is technology. It's easy to make the mental leap to transfer optical sensor technology to other Broil appliances. My wife Elizabeth imagined out loud how she could help you choose a roast chicken with the whole skin on. 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 technology, can monitor the bird inside and out, letting you fine-tune the cooking, or even do it for you.

For example, it can remove heat when the skin is dark enough, allowing it to finish without burning. Or if the interior was finished, it could give the exterior a quick brown, maybe even flip the extra elements or brown the fans quickly without the interior drying out.

There are so many toasters out there, especially in the high-end segment, that it can be difficult just to find a toaster that toasts well and fits your budget. However, there are good ones. If you want something tech-savvy and stylish, try Balmuda. On the analog end, Elizabeth and I received a classic Cuisinart 4-piece metal toaster as a wedding gift in 2012, which has all the controls you need and a screen for getting ready. It's now about $70, and while ours is starting to fade, and I keep thinking I'll have to replace it, it's still going strong.

We like the four slots for two, which gives each two slices at our preferred prep time more or less at the same time. He 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 works and adjust the regular dial to your liking and hit the cancel button if there's any smoke.

So as I sat there, writing my rough draft and staring at the Eye Q, I wondered how I could score this thing fairly. I appreciated the not-so-shiny look and the good toast it often made, and thought, I'd be very happy if this were my last toaster. But the last day I had it, I poured some sourdough on a light setting, made sure it was in sourdough mode, and pressed start. What came out was toasty enough that little wisps of smoke came out. By then I was ready to pull my 14-year-old beauty out of temporary storage under my desk and be happy about it too.