At Smile Craft Dental, we have moved past that experience entirely. Our Redwood City office uses advanced digital impression technology to capture precise images of your teeth in minutes, without a single tray of putty. Dr. Janice Chou and Dr. Brendon Nguyen have built our practice around staying current with dental advancements, and our digital scanning system is one of the clearest examples of that commitment translating into real comfort for the patients we see throughout Redwood City and Sunnyvale.
What Are Digital Dental Impressions
Digital impressions use a small handheld scanner to capture a detailed, three-dimensional image of your teeth, gums, and bite. Instead of biting into a tray filled with impression material, you simply sit back while our team guides the scanner along your teeth. The device stitches together hundreds of images in real time, building an accurate digital model of your mouth on a chairside screen.
This model can then be used for a wide range of purposes, from planning a same-day dental crown to designing clear aligners. Because the scan happens in real time, our team can review the image with you immediately, verify accuracy, and ensure every detail has been captured before moving forward with treatment. There is no waiting for a lab to process a physical mold, and there is no risk of the material shifting or setting incorrectly.
How Digital Scanning Improves Comfort and Accuracy
The biggest difference patients notice is comfort. There is no bulky tray pressing against the roof of your mouth, no strange taste, and no worrying about a gag reflex. The scanning wand is slim and moves easily around your teeth, and most full scans are finished in just a few minutes. Research published in the National Library of Medicine found that digital scanning offers satisfactory to excellent reproducibility, shorter scanning time, and improved patient comfort compared with conventional impression techniques, which aligns closely with what our own patients tell us after their first digital scan.
Accuracy also improves with this approach. A traditional mold can slightly distort as it sets or as it is being removed from your mouth, which sometimes means a second impression is needed. A digital scan captures the exact shape of your teeth the first time, giving our team and any dental lab we work with a highly precise model to build from. That precision matters most when we are creating something that needs to fit exactly right, whether that is a same-day crown, a night guard, or a retainer.
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What Digital Impressions Are Used for at Our Redwood City Office
Digital scanning plays a role in several parts of your dental care at our Redwood City office. Some of the most common applications include the following.
- Designing and fitting same-day CEREC crowns without the need for a temporary crown or a second appointment
- Creating clear aligner trays for patients pursuing Invisalign treatment
- Building custom night guards, retainers, and mouth guards that fit precisely against your bite
- Tracking subtle changes in tooth position or wear over time by comparing scans from different visits
Because these scans integrate with our broader 3D dental scanning capabilities, our team can move from diagnosis to a finished restoration with far fewer appointments than older methods typically required. For patients balancing work and family schedules in Redwood City and Sunnyvale, that efficiency often matters as much as comfort.
What to Expect During a Digital Impression Appointment
If you have never had a digital impression taken, the process is straightforward. Our team will walk the scanner gently along the outside, inside, and biting surfaces of your teeth, capturing images from multiple angles. You can breathe normally throughout, and most patients find the experience takes only a few minutes per arch. Once the scan is complete, we review the digital model together on screen, checking that every surface has been captured clearly.
From there, the model is either used immediately, as with same-day crown design, or sent digitally to a dental lab for a custom appliance like a retainer or night guard. Either way, there is no messy cleanup, no waiting for material to set, and no second visit needed just to redo an impression that did not come out clearly the first time.
Schedule Your Digital Impression Appointment in Redwood City, CA
Digital impressions are one more way we have built our Redwood City and Sunnyvale practice around patient comfort without sacrificing precision. Dr. Janice Chou, a former clinical instructor at the University of the Pacific Arthur A. Dugoni School of Dentistry, and Dr. Brendon Nguyen bring that same attention to detail to every appointment, whether you are here for a routine visit or a same-day restoration. You can learn more about our team on our about page.
If you are ready to experience a more comfortable approach to dental impressions, we would love to see you. Reach out through our contact form to schedule your visit.
