Oral-B Triumph Professional Care 9500DLX toothbrush review

Clean teeth or expensive shoe brush? We find out

3 September 2006 0:58 GMT / By Stuart Miles

According to Oral-B, the Triumph or Professional Care 9500DLX to give it is more unexciting name, is the company's "most technologically advanced power toothbrush ever".

So what can it do? We get brushing to find out.

Well for starters the toothbrush offers four cleaning modes including Clean, Massage, Soft and Polish. The modes cover virtually everything you can think of doing with a toothbrush in your mouth from massaging your gums to polishing your teeth to rid you of coffee or tobacco stains.

Oral-B promise this ability to clean because the brush operates at 40,000 in-and-out pulsations per minute that supposedly gently loosen plaque and 8800 oscillating movements that sweep it away.

Get past the brushing modes and speed stats and the Triumph features a small mono LCD display letting you know battery life (so you don't run out of charge halfway through a brush) as well as other information like when brushes need to be changed.

To help you brush effectively, the brush also features a timer that lets you know when you've reached the recommended 2 minutes cleaning time. In tests we found that while this sounds like a useful feature you can't actually see the timer while brushing.

It would have been great if the timer was on the back (rather than the front) and reversed you could easily see how long you've got left in the mirror.

In use, bored is perhaps how you'll feel for the Triumph does such a good job there is little to think about apart from waiting for the unit to alert you to move on to the next quadrant (every 30 seconds you get a pulse so you know you are done).

What we do like though is the brush's ability to recognise different brush heads. Plug in the polishing brush for example and the unit automatically selects that mode. The system also manages to track the brush head, even if you swap it out with another, so that it can tell you when it needs replacing.

When it comes to recharging, Oral-B has supplied a whopping charging base, which even includes a case for all your brushes when you aren't using them, however travellers needn't panic, the company has developed a smaller travel charger which rather cleverly can be removed from the bigger docking station and used on the move.

As with other electronic gear for the bathroom, the charger works off a standard shaver socket or with the help of a European adapter (or even a bespoke shaving adapter) can be plugged into a regular socket.

Verdict

With the two heads - one for brushing and one for polishing - the Oral-B Triumph offers a great clean that you'll get excited about, the only thing that might put you off however is the price.

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Review Recap

Made by: Oral-b
Price as reviewed: £165
The good: Rechargeable, number of settings for different brushing, timer so you know when to stop
The bad: Expensive, vibrates so much your gob wash runs down your arm
Quick verdict: Expensive, but it will give you a set of gnashers to be proud of
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