Zoom announces 27-inch touchscreen for taking video calls at home

Plenty of folks will rely on Zoom for the foreseeable future, so naturally the company is getting into the hardware game. 

The San Jose-based video conferencing company announced its first Zoom from Home device on Wednesday. It’s a partnership with DTEN, also based in San Jose, which makes corporate video conferencing equipment. It’s accepting pre-orders for the DTEN ME for $599, which should ship in August. 

It’s essentially a second monitor for your desk that works natively with Zoom, enabling video calls and collaboration with a big, fancy touchscreen.

Let’s dig into the specs: For six Benjamins, you get a 27-inch capacitive touchscreen with 1080p resolution and a 16:9 aspect ratio. It has three cameras and eight microphones to make your Zoom calls look and sound better than they probably do from your old laptop. DTEN ME connects to the internet via WiFi or Ethernet, and has an HDMI port, too.

The touchscreen can be used for content sharing and annotation, just in case you need to mark up a chart like John Madden or something. In general, it seems like this does most of the same things you can already do with Zoom on a computer, but with better mics and cameras, and it frees up processing power on your computer, too.

That said, Zoom’s name has been attached to some iffy privacy practices, as we highlighted at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The company has beefed up its security systems a bit in the interim, but some folks might understandably be wary of paying $600 for a Zoom-powered camera in their homes. Facebook, of course, had the same issue with Portal.