Deep Dive
The TV That Refused to Be a TV
Most televisions, when off, look like a hole in your wall. A black, reflective void that says everything about what your living room actually is: a room designed around a screen. Samsung looked at that problem and had an idea. Not a feature. An idea.
The Frame TV - launched in 2017 at the Musée du Louvre, exhibited at the Venice Biennale, co-designed by Yves Béhar - does one thing that changes everything: when you're done watching, it becomes a painting.
Not metaphorically. It displays fine art from MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musée d'Orsay, and 70+ other institutions. It has a matte, anti-reflection display that looks like canvas, not glass. It has magnetic bezels you swap like picture frames. It has a motion sensor that turns on when you walk in the room, and an ambient light sensor that dims to match the afternoon sun. It even comes with a near-flush wall mount so it hangs like a painting, not a TV on a wall.
This is who it's for: people who love their homes and hate what TVs do to them. Interior designers. Art lovers. Minimalists who have put considerable effort into making their living room look a certain way and then have to live with a 65-inch black rectangle dominating the space for 20 hours a day.
No other television so seamlessly blends technology and design, turning a simple screen into a piece of art.
- Living Etc., after a month-long test
What You're Actually Buying
The Frame is not the most powerful TV for the money. That's the honest version of this story. If you want the best blacks, the highest contrast, the most accurate color for cinema - there are better televisions. An LG OLED will make Christopher Nolan happier. A Sony Bravia will do things with image processing that would make a film professor cry.
But you're not buying The Frame to watch films. You're buying The Frame to live with it. The QLED panel delivers good 4K with Quantum Dot color - bright enough, vivid enough, more than adequate for streaming and casual gaming. The 2025 models add 144Hz on larger sizes and AMD FreeSync Premium, which genuinely expands the audience. The Frame Pro, launched in 2025 as a premium tier, goes further: Neo QLED Mini-LED backlight, approximately 1,000 nits peak brightness, and a Wireless One Connect Box that moves all the cables to a separate box you can hide in a drawer.
That's the gap that mattered. The original Frame's ~400 nits brightness was a legitimate critique for SDR content. The Pro closes it. Tom's Guide, after initially being skeptical of the Frame line, reversed their position on the Pro: "I hated Samsung's The Frame until I tried the new Frame Pro - and it's shaping up to be my favorite TV of 2025."
The Art Mode Difference
The matte anti-reflection coating on The Frame isn't just better than most TVs. It's purpose-built to make digital images look like they're on paper or canvas. Independent reviewer Bless'er House put it plainly: "The matte display does such a phenomenal job at cutting back on glare from the sun, and artworks end up looking more like paintings than images rendered with a screen." The 2026 models take this further with a next-generation Glare Free layer that Samsung describes as making reflections "virtually nonexistent."
The Art Store: A Museum in Your Living Room
Here is the part that sounds ridiculous until you live with it. The Samsung Art Store has 3,000+ works. From the Met. From MoMA. From the Musée d'Orsay. From the Tate. From the estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. From René Magritte's estate. Over 70 institutional partners. Over 1,000 artists.
It started with a few dozen images in 2017. Samsung grew it by doing something obvious that nobody had done before: going to museums and asking them to license digital reproductions for display in people's homes. Museums said yes, partly because the Pantone ArtfulColor validation introduced in 2024 made the proposition credible. The Frame is the first display ever certified by Pantone for art reproduction accuracy. The colors are not approximations - they're validated against Pantone's standards for faithful reproduction of the original works.
The subscription costs $4.99 a month, or $49.99 a year. Many users think this is overpriced for what they need. The free tier offers 30 rotating works per month - more than enough for most households. And you can always upload your own photos, turning The Frame into a personal gallery of family portraits or your own photography. The community has figured out a workaround too: Etsy sellers offer high-resolution digital art files optimized for The Frame at $3-10 per piece, which you buy once and keep forever.
TechRadar's reviewer put it this way: "I use the Samsung Art Store every day on my Frame TV, and it's more fun than streaming."
History
From the Louvre to Your Living Room
It's 2017. Samsung brings a TV to the Louvre. Not to sell it in the gift shop - to launch it. The same year, The Frame shows up at the 57th Venice Biennale, the world's largest contemporary art exhibition, in partnership with Korean artist Lee Wan. The theme: "A Combination of Art and Technology."
This wasn't marketing. It was positioning. Samsung was making a statement about what The Frame is not: it's not a better TV. It's a different category. The appliance that was a screen became the appliance that was a frame. Yves Béhar, the Swiss-American designer who co-created the original 2017 Frame (and is also known for the One Laptop Per Child initiative), brought human-centered design thinking to a product category that had spent decades optimizing purely for performance specs.
Nine years later - and there's a version of this story where that seems impossible - The Frame is still the dominant product in its category. No competitor has matched its market share in lifestyle TVs. The 2025 lineup expanded to two tiers. The 2026 models, announced at CES, add sizes up to 98 inches, next-generation anti-glare technology, DLG 240Hz support, and built-in cable management. The Frame Pro 2026 starts at $1,999 for the 55-inch - a meaningful price reduction from 2025.
The Frame is one of the most beautiful TVs that you can buy today... the TV itself looks like a piece of art hung on the wall even when it's not in use.
- CNN Underscored
The Honest Critique
No product profile is worth reading if it doesn't tell you what doesn't work. Here's what The Frame gets wrong - or at least, what owners complain about consistently.
The One Connect Box on the Frame Pro is wireless between the box and the TV panel. That's brilliant for aesthetics. But some owners have had to reposition the box to get a stable signal - the wireless connection can be finicky about placement and interference. It's a real-world complaint, not a spec sheet problem.
Uploading personal photos from your phone to Art Mode is frequently buggy. The smart TV software occasionally defaults to a free streaming channel on startup instead of your preferred input. The menu has a documented tendency to appear mid-viewing for no apparent reason. These are software issues, and Samsung has a track record of fixing them via updates - but they're real friction.
The Art Store subscription model is a recurring source of irritation. $4.99 per month for digital art you don't own feels like renting a painting you can never take home. The free tier and the personal photo upload feature mitigate this considerably, but the business model is worth understanding before you buy.
RTINGS.com measured the 2024 Frame at approximately 431 nits SDR and 590 nits HDR. That's adequate. For an edge-lit QLED in the sub-$1,500 range, it competes fine. But it's not competitive with Mini-LED or OLED alternatives for cinema use. Know what you're buying.
The Frame is the right TV for people who care about what their home looks like when they're not watching TV. It's a design object first, television second, and art display third - in that order of priority. Buy it if the aesthetics of your living room matter to you and the standard "black mirror off" problem bothers you. Buy the Frame Pro if you also want serious viewing performance. Skip it if you're building a home cinema.
What People Are Saying
