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Breville Eye Q Toaster Review: Neat Sensors, but Less-Than-Perfect Toast

Buy NowMultiple Buying Options Available$300 at Breville$300 at Williams-SonomaSave this storySave this storyRating:5/10Open rating explainerWIREDA good-looking toaster with a big helping of tech that helps it determine when your toast is done. A wide range of settings, with special functions for bagels and sourdough bread. Comes in two-slot and four-slot models.TIREDAt $300 for the cheapest version, the toasting quality should be better than the competition, and it isn’t.

立即购买，多种购买选项可选，Breville 售价 300 美元，Williams-Sonoma 售价 300 美元。评分：5/10。这是一款外观精美且科技感十足的烤面包机，能够自动判断面包何时烤好。它拥有多种设置，并针对贝果和酸种面包提供了特殊功能，分为双槽和四槽两种型号。缺点：作为最便宜也要 300 美元的产品，其烘烤质量理应优于竞争对手，但事实并非如此。

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.

当你第一次尝试 Breville 这款全新的高科技烤面包机时，请在黑暗中进行。除了正面柔和的绿灯和加热丝发出的温暖橙光外，你绝对无法忽视从左侧槽位发出的、如同迪斯科舞厅般快速闪烁的激光绿光。

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.

看！这就是 Breville Eye Q 烤面包机。据该公司称，它没有使用传统的定时器，而是利用光学传感器以每秒 10 次的频率扫描面包。烤面包机通过闪烁的绿灯在烘烤过程中监测面包的熟度，一旦达到你预设的程度，便会立即停止工作。

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?)

这意味着烤面包机会在面包放入槽位时对其进行观察，然后将其烤至比初始状态更深的颜色。（奇怪的是，Breville 将熟度设置分为七个渐进的深色等级。也许不是 10 个等级是因为超过七级之后就只是不同程度的焦糊了？）

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.

当我们进一步探索这款奇特的电器时，请暂时抑制住“烤面包不需要这么多科技”的念头，并欣赏 Breville 能够研发出这种烘烤方式，这确实令人印象深刻。

Courtesy of BrevilleIf, 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.

图片由 Breville 提供。如果你以前用过烤面包机，你会发现售价 300 美元的 Breville Eye Q 850 自动双槽款及其 400 美元的四槽款设计非常易懂。按下正面的大按钮，面包就会滑入槽内。（你知道的，就像按下杠杆让加热丝变热一样。）左右两侧的按钮用于调节熟度。如果烤出来的面包比你预期的要浅，Breville 经典的“再烤一会儿”（A bit more）按钮可以帮你把它烤得更深一点。根据你所在地区的不同，还有贝果或英式松饼设置；只需确保烘烤面朝外，以便传感器能监测到正确的一面。

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.

在烘烤前按住开始/停止按钮两秒钟，即可触发酸种面包模式，该模式会在面包中心比普通模式稍浅时停止烘烤。这是为了防止更容易烤焦的酸种面包边缘被烤糊。快速按两次按钮则会进入传统的定时器模式，Breville 建议在烤 Pop-Tarts 或冷冻华夫饼等食物时使用此模式。

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.

说到冷冻食品，它没有专门的按钮。传感器并不在意你的食物是否冷冻；它只是持续烘烤直到达到预期的颜色，就像烤普通面包一样。这会多花一点时间，但对烤面包机而言，最终目标是一样的。

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.

除了 Breville 完美的环形插头（让插拔变得轻而易举并减少电线磨损）之外，这里还有两个特别好的设计。首先是电源线可以收纳在机身背面，有助于保持台面整洁——这里可不会出现“房间评测员”指出的电线杂乱问题！其次是一个容量大且易于使用的碎屑托盘。有趣的是，Breville 美国专利申请中的原理框图和摘要被蚀刻在碎屑托盘底部，这对于光学传感器爱好者来说是一个彩蛋。

It comes in two-slice and four-slice versions. Courtesy of BrevilleIt’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.

它有双片和四片版本。图片由 Breville 提供。作为台面电器，它的外观也非常不错，Breville 的产品通常都能轻松达到这一标准。“暗黑”拉丝钢外观精美，控制直观，陶瓷涂层顶部干净整洁，且比传统的不锈钢顶部更能长久保持这种状态。

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.

今年夏天，我带着 Eye Q 去新罕布什尔州度过了几周的家庭时光，餐桌旁经常坐着八个人甚至更多，从十几岁的孩子到八十多岁的老人都有。几乎每个人都对这款烤面包机很感兴趣，令人欣慰的是，没有人需要指导就能学会如何使用它。

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 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.

在我使用它的几个月里，它几乎总是能完成令人满意的烘烤工作。烤出合适的面包并不难，但是——这是一个很大的转折——与普通烤面包机相比，它烤出的面包质量相当，并没有更出色。总的来说，特别是如果你对比一片面包的前后，或者不同面包片之间，Eye Q 的烘烤稍微有些不均匀，而且面包顶部往往比底部颜色更深。这是一个显而易见的问题，但如果你在客人面前放上几片涂了黄油的面包，有礼貌的人是不会抱怨的。

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.

在制作 BLT 三明治的那天，我让侄子 Eli 当了一下午的实习生，让他按设置顺序依次烤了七批颜色渐深的面包，然后把它们按顺序排在烤盘上。最低档颜色很浅，二档和三档几乎一样，四档和五档效果极佳，六档却神秘地比四档还要浅，而七档则非常深且有点烤糊了。双槽烤面包机并非为连续七次烘烤而设计，但它的表现还算不错。商店买来的贝果表现则不尽如人意。

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.

回到西雅图后，我拆开了一台新的 Eye Q，但这台机器有个坏习惯，就是把浅色档烤得比大多数人预期的要深，所以 Breville 又寄来了一台以完成测试。这台机器工作正常，尽管它倾向于把边缘烤得比中心更焦；随着测试接近尾声，这种情况似乎变得更严重了，所以如果你打算购买，也许可以先观察几个月的评论再做决定。

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,

为了不让你感到厌烦，我只想说，烤面包机——即使是好的烤面包机——也很难将面包烤得均匀。正如我在 2016 年所说，烤面包机行业就像是一场赌博。