Samsung The Frame TV
THE ART FEATURES ARE IMPRESSIVE AND THE PRICE IS AFFORDABLE. BUT AS A TV IT’S ONLY ABOVE-AVERAGE.
IT TOOK SOME time but, over the past year, Samsung started making some of the best LCD TVs we’ve ever seen. While the premium TV market is firmly embedded in the OLED space, there’s still much to recommend about LCD TVs and we had high hopes of Samsung’s high art concept.
The Frame is a different beast to what we’ve seen from top-end tellies in recent times. It’s decidedly chunky compared to rivals but this is to preserve the uniformity of the bezel’s thickness, which is designed to mimic a fine-art frame. The TV’s stand represents an ugly afterthought: this TV is designed to be wall-mounted (or displayed on a special, three-legged easel). The special slim-fit wall mount allows it to be set almost flush with the wall with only a slight degree of forward tilt and rotation adjustment available. The bezel is black plastic but Samsung has created three clip-on upgrades: walnut, beige wood (which resembles pine), and white plastic. They cost a hefty $299 each but they’re precision-made.
It utilises Samsung’s impressive One Clear Connection cable, which hosts all signal and power in one, very-skinny, Teflon-coated connection. It’s near invisible. This connects to a control box which offers the usual connectivity including four HDMI and three USB 2.0 ports.
It’s worth noting Samsung’s auto-setup is one of the smoothest and most-intuitive around. If you start by plugging in the HDMI cables and turning everything on, the setup routine will attempt to automatically identify the devices and assign relevant logos to each. It worked great for our Chromecast and Xbox but we had to manually identify our Fetch TV (but it only took a couple of clicks).
Once done, you’re greeted with the Tizen Operating System’s ribbon navigation bar, which lists apps and inputs pictorially at the bottom. You can easily change the order and this, plus the subtle wobbles and swooshes, makes navigation an intuitive pleasure. To the far left are settings which offer quick access to picture and audio adjustments plus ‘Expert’ settings.
Tizen might not offer the world’s largest selection of apps, but it’s got all of the important Australian ones covered including all catchupTV channels plus Netflix, Amazon Prime and Stan (which are all worth having nowadays). There’s also the excellent Plex app for beaming media from other sources.
The white plastic remote is a variant on
ART MODE LITERALLY TURNS THE TV INTO A SMART PICTURE FRAME. SAMSUNG BUNDLES A VARIETY OF ART WORKS FROM VARIOUS GENRES BUT MANY HAVE A STOCK ART FEEL.
Samsung’s One Remote. It’s simple and intuitive but has an extra button which controls Art Mode. A quick power-button press switches between this and TV Mode (meaning a long-press is required to turn the TV off).
Art Mode literally turns the TV into a smart picture frame. Samsung bundles a variety of art works from various genres but many have a stock art feel. The Old Masters that come with LG’s Wallpaper TV feel absent. You can add your own photos but Samsung hopes you’ll use its SmartThings app to buy additional art. The company has struck partnerships with Austria’s Albertina gallery, Berlin’s Lumas gallery, and the prestigious Magnum picture agency.
A special button opens lighting settings which raises or lowers brightness and warms or cools the picture. Images can be displayed with a faux, bevel-cut mount which looks very effective and adds to the art effect. Generally, the picture is bright and uniformly-lit – you can stare at the static images (including those with extensive, white backgrounds) for considerable periods without tiring your eyes. Other features include auto-dimming to match the ambient light and an auto-on/off motion sensor to ensure that energy isn’t wasted when nobody is looking. Slideshow timing options run from 10 minutes through to a week – this is no oversized LCD picture frame for scrolling through family snapshots.
However, The Frame is fundamentally a TV, so how did it perform? Having marvelled at Samsung’s rear-lit Q9F LCD TV in recent times, we had high hopes that this would offer similar performance. Unfortunately, our first tests showed that it wouldn’t. We played the opening of The Martian, including the high-contrast production-company trailers: the Fox fanfare searchlights are a great test for a TV’s ability to display true blacks in the letterbox bars without light from the beams bleeding into them. Samsung’s Q9F rivals OLED TVs with near-flawless performance but The Frame’s lighting isn’t nearly so refined and precise. While it’s not an issue in a bright room, in the dark, the extensive light bleed got distracting.
Nonetheless, panning through the Martian landscape was super smooth thanks to the UHD Blu-ray source and colours were nicely enhanced with the switch to Dynamic Mode – although we did miss the eye-melting vibrance of Samsung’s QLED colour technology.
HDR compatibility meant that we saw impressive detail in dark areas although light areas often blew-out too easily. We switched to the HDR10+ compatible The Grand Tour on Amazon and watched Season 2’s Lamborghini review. This always looks stunning on HDR TVs but it definitely wasn’t as colourful or punchy as we’ve seen from top performers.
Upscaling low-resolution content could be
hit and miss. Samsung has made great strides in this area but people and objects were often over-sharpened and looked unnatural. The main issues arose with panning shots across less-than-4K content where significant pixelation issues appeared (along with some colour smearing) across the screen. It doesn’t happen too often but it’s enough to be annoying and a constant reminder that this isn’t a top-tier TV.
Sound is similarly a bit all over the shop. With music, the 40-Watt 2.2-channel speakers can sound very impressive with loud, punchy bass and distinct treble and vocal performance. However, with general viewing, performance once again varied considerably according to quality of the source: Blu-ray movies sounded great while HD Chromecast audio could get muddy. It’s hard to fix in the settings.
At $2,695 for the 55-inch variant, it’s still pretty good value (remember to factor in $299 for the bezel). The 43-inch model costs $1,795 while the 65-incher costs $3,895. Ultimately, Panasonic’s slightly-cheaper OLED is a better TV, but with LG’s art-friendly ‘Wallpaper TV’ rival costing $7,499, if you’re going to use the art features, it’s a good buy.