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.