Samsung The Frame Review: An art TV that can really class up your living room, but is it worth the price?
The cool factor is through the roof, but we're talking about your wall, here -- and I have thoughts.
When is a TV not just a TV? When it's also a museum piece, something that can turn your wall into an art gallery in between episodes of Hacks. Samsung pioneered — some would say perfected — this idea with The Frame Series, an expensive but genuinely cool lineup of TVs with low-glare screens, clever art-mode screensavers and optional physical frames (which Samsung calls bezels). Add one and suddenly it doesn't look like a TV mounted on your wall; it looks like a piece of art. Ah, but now there's competition, some of it priced a lot lower (looking at you, Hisense CanvasTV), so is this still the best choice? Here's my review of Samsung's The Frame TV.
Read more:
Available sizes (inches): 43, 50, 55, 65, 75, 85 | Frame included: Basic black | Dolby(s): Atmos | Operating System: Tizen | Smart-home compatibility: Alexa, Bixby | Voice controls: Push-button
VERDICT: With its unrivaled art collection and attractive bezel options, the Frame makes a lovely addition to the living room. It's awfully expensive, though, and certain aspects of the art and TV experiences could be better.
- Polished, pleasing art mode
- Lots of cool third-party frames available
- Solar-powered remote
- Vibrant, well-balanced color
- Thin, no-gap design and clever breakout box
- Surprisingly decent speakers
- Expensive
- Art store requires a subscription
- Stock frame is black, thin and boring
- Samsung's pricey decorative frames are made of plastic
- Remote has small, cumbersome controls
- Poor printed mounting and setup instructions
- Buggy app, some usability issues.
I tested the 55-inch Frame (which I'm not going to refer to as "the Samsung The Frame," because grammar). If you haven't already seen one of these hanging in a friend's house, it's a super-thin TV with a special mount that holds it flush against the wall. That's one component of the "It's a painting!" illusion; a lot of TV mounts — if not the TVs themselves — leave the screen protruding at least an inch or two.
Ironically, the frame part of The Frame is its most underwhelming feature. It's a bit more substantial and "frame-like" than the bezel surrounding most TVs, but the black color leaves it looking pretty generic.
If you wall-mount the TV as-is, you'll likely look at it and think, "Yep, that's a wall-mounted TV." Although Samsung's virtual mats (see below) help compensate for this, the whole point of this thing is to adorn it with a contrasting, eye-catching border. And that means spending a minimum of $150 (for a 55-inch; larger ones start at $200), assuming you buy one from Samsung's bezel collection. They're plastic, too, not metal, making the pricing seem even more egregious.
My advice: Check out some of the third-party Frame bezel offerings available from Amazon and elsewhere. Many of them are even more expensive, but also more substantial. Here's one such example:
Samsung The Frame: Mounting and Setup
Here's hoping you're fairly handy, or have a friend who is, because Samsung's mounting instructions (and operating instructions in general) are abysmal. I've run out of patience with mammoth companies that can't be bothered to provide a decent printed setup guide, especially for something as important as mounting a heavy TV on a wall.
Thankfully, it's not overly complicated, and Samsung does provide a pair of traditional feet — which snap onto the bottom with ease — if you'd rather place the TV atop a stand (which is what I did for testing).
Remember, though, the Frame's raison-d'etre is to simulate a framed painting, and that means finding it a wall — ideally obscuring any visible wires at the same time. Samsung helps to facilitate this via its clever One Connect, a "breakout box" that houses the TV's power supply, four HDMI inputs and a smattering of other ports. A single, very thin cable runs from the TV to that box, which would ideally sequester inside a piece of furniture below the screen.
That cord could be painted to match the wall, making it nearly invisible, or snaked through the wall if you're open to drilling a couple holes. (Option C: An inexpensive raceway track like this one, but plan on painting it as well to help preserve the no-cords illusion.)
YouTube is home to some helpful how-to videos on the various ways to mount the Frame; I recommend watching a few before deciding where it should go (or even if it should go).
That part done, I love the friendly welcome screen that gives you a choice between using your phone or the remote to set everything up. I don't love the extensive hoop-jumping that follows, from installing the Samsung SmartThings app to creating an account to agreeing to a huge assortment of permissions: on your phone, on the Samsung account page and in the app. It's just ... a lot. I can see users getting confused by all the pop-ups and menus and frustrated by how long this process takes.
Thankfully, once you're through the thicket, it's time sit back and watch TV — or visit a virtual museum.
Samsung The Frame: What it's like as a TV
This is the rare TV that doesn't have an Amazon, Google or Roku interface; instead, Samsung employs the Tizen operating system, which looks fairly similar to Google's and shares some of that same cluttered busyness. It's not difficult to learn and navigate, but it did leave me longing for the streamlined simplicity of my Roku TV — and especially for my Roku remote.
Indeed, I didn't like Samsung's bantam, non-backlit clicker, which has small, monochromatic buttons, an unintuitive layout and cumbersome rocker switches for channel and volume controls. You'd be forgiven for wondering why there's no Mute button; turns out you press down on the volume rocker, which I suspect few people would figure out on their own. To my thinking, Mute should have its own button, same as every other remote on the planet.
There's one cool thing, though: the little solar panel built into the backside. Leave it facing up once in a while and you should never have to worry about charging the remote. (It doesn't need sunlight, just ambient room light.) If it does happen to go dead, a standard USB-C cable recharges it.
I watched some telltale scenes from Mythic Quest season 3 and Solo: A Star Wars Story and various 4K YouTube videos of colorful landscapes. On the whole I'd describe the Frame's image quality as very good: warm, nicely balanced colors — not overly vivid but not drab, either — with solid, if not spectacular, brightness and contrast. There's no Dolby Vision here, but the Frame does support HDR10+, which closely matches Vision's picture-improving wizardry. The matte finish on the display keeps glare to a minimum, which is great not only for art mode, but also for watching TV.
I've seen several reviews call out this model's less-than-stellar viewing angles, but I don't share that complaint. Most non-OLED screens will lose some color and brightness if you look at them them from the side, and I didn't find the loss to be that great here.
I did expect that a super-skinny TV like this would have weak, poor-sounding speakers, but I was pleasantly surprised: The Frame produces rich, robust audio, with Dolby Atmos on hand for content that supports it. (That said, I'd still recommend a soundbar, which will broaden the soundstage and also add bass, surround and more. Here are our best soundbar picks for 2024.)
Curiously, I ran into trouble getting voice controls to work. Although I configured the Frame for use with Alexa (it was either that or Samsung's Bixby; there's no support for Google Assistant), there was simply no response when I pressed the microphone button. Turns out there's a microscopic, hard-to-access microphone on/off switch on the back of the TV. Which position is on and which is off? No way to know; the instructions don't make it clear. And it makes the exact same "ding" sound when you move it up or down; no help there. I tried it in both positions and still couldn't get Alexa to work.
Another oddity: When you mute the audio, a mute icon flashes slowly on the screen. Not in a corner, but on the left edge near the center. It's annoying and unnecessary.
Samsung The Frame: What it's like as an art piece
On paper (make that canvas?), The Frame easily bests the Hisense CanvasTV and TCL Nxtframe in the art department: Samsung's Art Store is home to over 2,500 works, at least 10 times more than you'll find on those other TVs. The store is easy to browse and nicely curated into various collections: Masters, Global Top 20, Just For Kids and so on.
However, you'll need a subscription to access it. It's not expensive — just $5 monthly or $50 annually — but I dislike having to pay yet another fee. Hisense and TCL don't charge for art (though, in fairness, you get a lot less of it).
Samsung does give you 20 free pieces of art that change monthly, plus you can upload photos of your own, so technically it's possible to enjoy art mode without a subscription.
To engage it, all you do is press the Off button on the remote. I wish there was a dedicated button for it, just for simplicity's sake, but here art is the default "off" state. You can also access it via the TV's sidebar menu.
As you'd expect, Samsung lets you choose how often to rotate artworks and whether to show in them in order or randomly. You can also adjust brightness, motion-detection sensitivity and sleep hours, and there's a Night Mode that turns the frame on or off automatically depending on room brightness.
However, there are some real usability quirks here. For starters, Art Mode Settings are inexplicably located at the very bottom of the Art Store (meaning a lot of scrolling to get there), and they're a bit different in the app than they are onscreen. Why these settings aren't more readily accessible, I don't understand.
One of them — available only on the TV itself — is called Art Mode Effect, and when it's toggled off (which it is by default), you can lower the screen brightness only so far. It's exactly that lower brightness that helps create the, well, art mode effect, so I'm not sure why this option is even there, or why it would override the brightness settings available elsewhere.
Although you can add artworks to your personal Favorites collection, there's no other way to build an art "playlist." What's more, different collections seem to have different rules when it comes to mats: Some let you overlay them, some don't.
Speaking of which, Samsung offers five mat choices, all of them basically different thicknesses, and all available in a variety of colors. But there aren't any different designs or textures to choose from, as on the Hisense and TCL models. What's more, I couldn't find a way to choose a global mat setting that would apply to all selections. Instead, you have to manually choose a mat for each and every painting or photo in a collection. And you can't even cycle through the artworks by pressing the left or right button; you have to bring up the scrolling selection menu, choose the next piece, then select a mat for it.
Meanwhile, several times during my testing, I encountered an error when trying to upload one of my own images. Immediately following that, the app wouldn't let me make another attempt, informing me I need to "change Wi-Fi network." Equally frustrating, some photos I imported from my iPhone appeared weirdly stretched in the app (though eventually ended up formatted correctly on the TV). And Samsung seems to have removed the "collage" option for arranging personal photos, unfortunate because it was something I'd really admired on a friend's older Frame.
Given how long Samsung has been producing Frame TVs, I expected a bit better than this. Too many times while testing art mode, I found myself confused by the interface, frustrated by its limitations or just plain annoyed by app bugs.
Samsung The Frame: Should You Buy It?
A lot of this may not matter to you. Maybe you're content to show the same artwork for, say, a month at a time, or even permanently. If your primary goal is to buy a new TV that can also class up your decor, the Frame is pretty great. I love the art selection, love the way art looks on the low-glare matte screen, love how people are genuinely fooled — from a distance, anyway — into thinking there's an actual painting on the wall.
I don't love the exorbitant premium Samsung charges for the privilege — particularly $150 for a thin plastic bezel. Granted, the Frame Series goes on sale fairly regularly, often shaving hundreds off the list prices. But for this kind of money I'd like to see at least one decorative bezel included in the box (like Hisense), if not two (like TCL). I'd also like to see some real attention paid to improving usability, starting with better instructions in the box, smarter art controls and a less buggy app.
