Review: Philips Sonicare DiamondClean Black Edition

Electric toothbrushes come in at so many price points, it’s hard to keep up, but if you’re looking for one that caters to use at both home and on the road, it might be time to see what Philips has in store.

Features

A new toothbrush, the Philips Sonicare DiamondClean Black Edition is an electric toothbrush capable of making up to 31,000 brush strokes per minute using a hyper-fast vertically moving head powered by a lithium ion battery and small motor.

The brush features five modes for you to choose from, switched by pressing the button within three seconds from powering the brush on.

The Philips Sonicare DiamondClean supports a rechargeable battery capable of lasting up to three weeks dependent on the mode it has been set to.

Two chargers are also included in the box, with a glass-topped induction charger, as well as a travel case with support for charging over a miniUSB port.

The travel case stores two toothbrush heads disconnected from the Philips toothbrush itself.

An icon at the bottom of the toothbrush glows for the battery, with green lit up for having plenty of charge, and yellow lit up for when the toothbrush is running out.

Performance

We don’t know many people who would spend $300 on a toothbrush, but we guess if you’re going to do that, you might as well get something special.

That’s what Philips thinks it has in the Sonicare DiamondClean Black, a mouthful of a name that takes last year’s DiamondClean toothbrush, spins it at a slightly faster speed, and partners it with some premium accessories that are included for you in the box.

“What sort of accessories?” I hear you ask, before you mumble “It’s a toothbrush, what sort of accessories would you need?”

Apparently, the kind that make recharging the electric toothbrush look more like you’re leaving it in your bathroom like you normally would, rather than placing it on the specially designed charger that so many toothbrushes rely on.

In fairness, the charger for the DiamondClean is a specially designed charger, but it’s one that looks built to resemble just a casual place for you to leave the toothbrush anyway, with the induction plate sitting under a glass.

It’s simple, clean, and won’t geek up that bathroom of yours with yet another protruding induction charger.

Another part of that $300 electric toothbrush package is, yet again, another charger. This time, though, Philips has your travelling heart considered, with a travel case that can work as a charger, handled with a miniUSB plug.

This is probably our favourite part of the package, even before we’ve even. pushed the brush into our mouth, as it means you don’t need to pack an induction charger in your luggage, nor do you need to scramble for extra international converter plugs.

Rather, miniUSB often ends in regular USB, so just plug the case into either your computer or a USB-ready travel plug converter and you can charge the toothbrush when you’re away from home. Fantastic.

Moving over to the toothbrush, and while Colgate and Oral-B both go for sensors in their respective products, the Philips angle appears to be one closer to letting you decide, rather than the combination of pressure and motion monitoring.

For the DiamondClean, you’ll be choosing from either the Clean, White, Polish, Gum Care, or Sensitive options on the toothbrush, with each of these modes providing a slightly different speed by which the head moves back and forth, and adding different types of pulsing, with the interval rate of a pulse changing based on the mode.

Depending on the mode, however, the brush can provide up to 31,000 strokes per minute, which if you’re particularly keen on keeping those whites the same shade, can help a great deal.

Also of note is the timer, with quadrant timers to help you know when you’re supposed to switch to different parts of your mouth, pulsing after 30 seconds of use. After a full two minutes, the toothbrush powers down, the battery light below blinking either green (you have lots of life left) or yellow (time to stick it on recharge).

In use, the toothbrush appears to be slightly higher pitched than the previous generation of Philips Sonicare toothbrushes, suggesting that the latest version is running at a faster speed, and that pitch is different across all the modes, too.

After a few weeks with the brush, our teeth feel quite good after a bout morning and night with the clean mode, and we’re particularly happy to see that the sensitive mode slows things down if our teeth are feeling a touch sensitive, as can happen.

The battery is also quite decent, providing a solid seven days of twice-day cleaning on the fastest mode (clean, at the top of the set), with around twice to three times that possible if you’re on the sensitive mode, which lowers the speed.

In fact, the sensitive mode appears to be a good way to get extra juice out of the DiamondClean’s battery, with a lower speed providing a few days extra when the yellow battery light pops up throughout your regular cleanings.

About the only complaints we have with the DiamondClean have to do with colour, and that of replacing the heads.

The model we’re testing is the DiamondClean Black. It is, understandably, a black toothbrush, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

But you try finding replacement heads for a black toothbrush and tell me how it goes, because in our search, we’ve only found white replacement heads for the Philips Sonicare range.

You get two heads in the DiamondClean box, which should last you between six and ten months, possibly the year (though we’re sure dentists would prefer it if you replaced the head every three months), but after that year, you’re probably going to have to settle on a white Philips DiamondClean head for your toothbrush.

While we have no problem with a white toothbrush, and we have no problem with a black toothbrush, the merging of the two might look silly in your eyes, or at least a touch perplexing.

We’re checking with Philips to see if there’s anything different between the two colour variants other than paint job, and if it’s the same, we’d suggest buying the white just to keep your toothbrush looking normal for years to come.

Conclusion

As far as electric toothbrushes go, the Philips DiamondClean offers a solid brushing experience with lots of thought given to what comes in the box.

We’re particularly impressed by the travel case with a built-in charger, as this is one of those inclusions that just makes sense, and is what anyone with a rechargeable toothbrush has wanted, making for a convenient and thoughtful way to travel the world without needing to carry that annoying wall wort relied upon for so many years.

Overall, it’s a great toothbrush, and if you’re looking at spending over two hundred on a toothbrush for your travels, this is one we’d seriously recommend.

 

Overall
Features
Value for money
Performance
Ease of Use
Design
Reader Rating0 Votes
Five options for teeth cleaning; Faster than the last model; Recharge station is a stylish induction glass; Travel case also works as a charger (woot!); Battery light gives a warning of a yellow light before it dies, and you still have a few brushes before it does; At least a week of battery life dependent on the mode you pick;
Black heads can't be easily found, so at one point when you replace the head, you're going to have a mismatched checkerboard of a toothbrush;
4.5