What We Bought: How Samsung Frame became my favorite piece of art in my living room

My first “adult” TV was a 200-pound CRT monster living inside an even more brutal, 300-pound closet with doors. Then I upgraded to a monitor and laptop setup that stowed away in the stowed compartment of my coffee table. The thing is, I hate black mirrors; The empty void that stares when the TV is off frightens me. (I blame The ring.) I decided to keep all screens hidden if I wasn’t actively watching them and completely avoid the wall-mounted TV altogether – until the market came up with one that looked like art when it’s closed.

Samsung The Frame TV It came out in 2017. I bought the 43 inch model back in 2019 and have been a huge fan of it ever since. Inside, it’s a fully serviceable smart TV with a QLED panel and Samsung’s Tizen OS (which the company shares Only authorized to use with non-Samsung TVs). The picture is bright, the sound is clear, and it’s easy to spot Tizen — but I’ve shelled out over $800 for the namesake feature.

The Frame TV does a great job of looking like art hanging on my wall. The thin board has the edges of the picture frame and is fixed flat to the wall, like a giant picture. The board connects via a thin wire to an external receiver/port hub/tuner box, which means you can actually drop the wire behind the drywall and stick it elsewhere, reinforcing the illusion that there’s nothing electronic going on here. The stone walls of my old house don’t allow this to happen, so I hide the wire behind a plant.

As for the effect, some people have come to ask me if we ever have a TV, standing just two feet away from The Frame. It’s fun to play them and watch their full surprise. I’ll say I’m jealous of Latest Models, which has a matte anti-reflective finish that I wish was my older model. I think it enhances the effect.

The stylish hardware in The Frame is an advantage, but the other significant factor in the illusion of art rather than television comes from Samsung’s Art Store, an $8 monthly subscription that gives access to plenty of artwork to view. There are collections from the Louvre (although choosing Vermeer to hang it on your wall would be over gullible) as well as the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, Etsy, Life Picture Collection, Saatchi Art, Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam, BBC Earth, Magnum photos and more. I tend to use abstracts and modern photography, and my child loves the illustrations and pictures of wildlife.

But if you’re (understandably) tired of subscribing to 25 different services to pay for and don’t want to add another to the list, the included “Samsung Collection” offers 10 artworks for free. You can also use your own photos if you prefer (just make sure they are big shape or it will look polka-dotted). I personally have not tried to use my own photos; I leave the art to the professionals.

I love switching up the picture a few times a month, and I can easily kill an hour choosing the next piece of art to decorate my walls. There is an option to cycle through all the photos in a group, and it automatically switches at regular intervals, from every 10 minutes to once a week. I firmly believe that adding a mat to a photo makes it look more realistic. After choosing the image you want to display, you have the option to select no mat, modern mat or square shadow frame. Both mats come in ten different colors, but I’ve never found anything that beats antique white in a modern mat option.

Given that the frame is technically always functional, you may have reservations about the TV’s energy use. In technical mode, Samsung says the 65-inch tire consumes about 50 watts of power. I’ve personally made a series of life changes – downsizing my square footage, replacing the car with an e-bike, cutting out meat, etc. – to reduce my carbon footprint, and allow myself this simple indulgence. But if this aspect weighs you down, you can even think about the same Carbon offset People buy when they fly.

In addition, there are two features that make sure that the frame is not Always on me. With night mode, the TV turns off by itself when the lights go out. Then in the morning, after sensing the light again, the art restarts. You can also set it to detect movement in the room, and turn it off when no one is around. When I tried it, my model kept turning off and didn’t sense motion again, even though I’m jumping right in front of it, so I chose to disable this feature. The same sensors that detect darkness and motion (in theory) also adjust the brightness of the picture, so it doesn’t look too intense, a trait that makes things look like a framed oil painting and less like a TV. And that, to me, is the bottom line.