A toaster should have accurate toasting settings, so that setting the dial to medium will give you neither ghost-white bread nor a singed black square, but rather golden-brown perfection-or something like it.It should produce consistently crisped bread with no white spots or burnt edges. Even toasting is the most crucial task of a toaster.Just keep this in mind when deciding whether to spend more on the Breville. That said, both the Breville and Cuisinart toasters are made well enough that you can reasonably expect them to last about five years (it could be longer or shorter, but the lifespan depends on how the circuitry and the heating elements hold up). But it doesn’t have superior heating elements or better-quality electrical components than the Cuisinarts, which cost significantly less. The Breville is a better-looking toaster with more features and complex circuitry. Based on our research, we know that paying more doesn’t always translate to better quality. And while we haven’t experienced this in our own long-term testing, we’ve read some customer reviews that say this model begins toasting unevenly after a year or two of use. It also has a toast-saving “A Bit More” button (which allows you to add a little more time to an underdone slice) and a “Lift & Look” lever (which lets you peek at the doneness of your slice without interrupting the toasting cycle). The stainless steel two-slot Breville BTA720XL Bit More Toaster produced the most consistent toast of any model we tested-golden brown all over with no white patches or lines-even after we made several back-to-back batches. And the Cuisinarts are covered by a generous three-year warranty (versus the one-year warranty that comes with most other toasters), so you have the option to return yours if you end up getting a lemon. That said, none of these issues are unique to Cuisinart toasters-most competing models seem to be similar, even the more expensive ones. We’ve also read some customer reviews indicating there may be some quality-control issues causing the Cuisinarts to toast unevenly (though we haven’t had any issues with the four models we’ve been long-term testing-two since 2018 and two since 2020). That said, we know from research we commissioned that the heating element wires in modern toasters are not as strong as they could be, making them more susceptible to breakage over time. The Cuisinarts offer a wide range of settings and easy-to-use controls, and they remain cool to the touch batch after batch. The Cuisinart CPT-122 2-Slice Compact Plastic Toaster and its four-slot version, the Cuisinart CPT-142 4-Slice Compact Plastic Toaster, both produced some of the finest, most evenly browned bread of all the toasters we tested (this was true in multiple rounds of testing over several years, with more than one of the same model). You may also want to consider getting a toaster oven instead-they’re far more versatile than a slot toaster, and, in our experience, they’re also more reliable. But we recommend spending only what you think is reasonable for something that may last you roughly five years (and knowing that yours could last for longer or shorter than that). There are a number of variables that can cause a toaster to fail, and it’s hard to predict an exact lifespan.
The big takeaway isn’t a huge surprise: The delicate electronics and cheaper components found in most modern toasters leave a lot of room for things to go wrong over time. A group of dedicated students disassembled two of our recommended toasters, as well as some vintage toasters, to run analyses on them. To understand why most toasters seem prone to failure, we reached out to the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at The Ohio State University. The knowledge gained from hundreds of hours of testing since 2015 has helped us identify the most promising models to test each year.
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