Samsung Frame Pro: The Iconic Picture Frame TV Goes Wireless

EDITORS’ NOTE

My findings here are based on testing I performed on a preproduction version of The Frame Pro at Samsung’s lab. I will hold off on giving it a formal score until I test the finalized version.

The Frame Pro is designed to look like a framed picture. This effect comes from flat bezels surrounding the screen, a big departure from the mostly bezel-free designs of most high-end TVs. The bezels are attached by magnets and removable. Samsung includes a staid flat black set with the TV, and white and wood-textured bezels are available for purchase separately.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

This TV is designed to be hung and comes with a flush wall mount instead of a table stand. If you want to put it on a table or the floor, you’ll need to buy a stand separately.

The big difference between The Frame Pro and the less expensive The Frame is that the Pro version is almost completely wireless. It offloads most of its electronics and ports to a separate Wireless One Connect box that wirelessly streams audio and video to the TV. It still requires a cord for power, but a single cable is easier to hide than a nest of devices and cords. The Wireless One Connect Box is a plain black plastic slab with four HDMI ports (one eARC), two USB-A ports, a 3.5mm RS-232C port, an optical audio output, an Ethernet port, and an antenna/cable connector.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

The Frame Pro further emphasizes its concept with a matte coating that gives the screen a printed picture quality. It looks very nice, almost completely reducing glare from all ambient light and really making static pictures look like physical paintings or photos instead of images on a display. Some of the best standalone digital picture frames we’ve tested, like the Aura Mason ($199), also have a matte screen finish. The TCL NXTFrame ($1,999.99 for 65 inches) is another matte-finish TV that doubles as a digital photo frame, though out of the two, Samsung’s The Frame Pro provides the more natural-looking picture.

The included remote is a simple white rectangular wand with a circular navigation pad near the top and a pinhole microphone above it, plus volume and channel rockers and dedicated service buttons for Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, Samsung TV Plus, and YouTube. It isn’t a rechargeable, solar-panel-equipped SolarCell remote like the one Samsung includes with the QN90F, QN990F, and S95F, so you’ll have to deal with batteries. 

Samsung’s smart TV platform is its own Tizen OS, which remains feature-packed and slightly frustrating. It supports all major streaming services, including Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Crunchyroll, Disney+, Netflix, Twitch, and YouTube, plus Apple AirPlay and Miracast/WiDi for local streaming from iPhones, iPads, Macs, and PCs. It also has Amazon Alexa and you can summon the virtual assistant hands-free via the TV’s far-field microphones.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

Many settings feel like they’re buried one or two menu layers deeper than on other interfaces, and the TV spends way too long trying to identify HDMI devices you plug in. It’s gotten a bit better, though, as you can now simply press the gear button on the remote to access a quick settings menu instead of having to navigate through several options before getting to those controls.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

The Samsung Art Store is available through Tizen OS on The Frame Pro. With a subscription, priced at $4.99 per month or $49.99 per year, you can access thousands of paintings and photos that look great on The Frame Pro. It’s a convenient way to regularly refresh the look of your space, but you can find even more artwork from various museum and archive sites like the National Gallery of Art in high resolution for free. If you go that route, you need to load the artwork on a USB drive to show it on the screen.

The Samsung The Frame Pro is a 4K QLED TV with a 120Hz refresh rate. It supports high dynamic range (HDR) content in HDR10, HDR10+, and hybrid log gamma (HLG), but not Dolby Vision. It has an ATSC 1.0 tuner for over-the-air broadcasts, but not ATSC 3.0 for 1080p and 4K broadcasts. 

I test TVs with a Klein K-10A colorimeter, a Murideo SIX-G signal generator, and Portrait Displays’ Calman software. As an LED-lit TV with no local dimming, The Frame Pro has only modest contrast. In HDR Filmmaker mode, it shows a peak brightness of 718 nits with a full-screen white field and 982 nits with an 18% white field, with a black level of 0.06cd/m^2 for a contrast ratio of 16,367:1. Reaching almost 1,000 nits is a good showing for a midrange TV, and it’s much brighter than the 2022 The Frame (476 nits 18%, 0.1cd/m^2 black level, 4,757:1 contrast ratio), but it’s blown out of the water by mini-LED TVs like the Samsung QN90F (2,259 nits with effectively perfectly dark blacks but some light bloom) and even OLED TVs like the Samsung S95F (1,363 nits at 18% with perfectly dark blacks and no light bloom) and the LG Evo G5 (1,608 nits at 18%, again with perfect blacks).

(Credit: PCMag)

Color on The Frame Pro, on the other hand, is hardly disappointing. The above charts show the TV’s measured color levels in Movie mode with an SDR signal compared against Rec.709 broadcast standards and with an HDR signal compared against DCI-P3 digital cinema standards. Whites are perfect in both cases, and while magentas are just a touch warm, nearly all colors are almost completely free of any sort of tint. It doesn’t cover the full DCI-P3 color space, but it comes very close while offering excellent color accuracy across the board.

The Frame Pro simply doesn’t have a mind-blowing picture, and that’s evident when watching movies on it. The lack of local dimming is a particular weakness, as seen in the party scenes of The Great Gatsby. Black suits show varying levels of darkness depending on how much white is in the frame. In darker frames, suits appear properly black, but when a lot of white elements like shirts, balloons, and lights are also in the shot, they appear washed out. Colors are strong, at least, with accurate skin tones and flourishes like orange feathers and blue water popping nicely.

Demonstration footage on the Spears & Munsil Ultra HD benchmark disc looks good, though not lifelike. The limited contrast, vibrant color, and matte finish on The Frame Pro gives landscape shots a nice impression of framed photographs. It’s an appealing look, but it’s not exactly the realistic view you would get from a brighter TV with higher contrast, like the QN90F, S95F, or LG Evo G5.

While it isn’t super-bright and lacks local dimming, The Frame Pro can at least preserve highlight and shadow details well. In snowy scenes, wisps of clouds and falling snowflakes can be discerned against white backgrounds, and shadowy trees in sunset landscape shots show plenty of detail, even if they appear washed out. Colorful objects look vivid against black backgrounds, with no light bloom. That said, you’ll get much deeper blacks from a mini-LED TV like the QN90F with minimal light bloom (the result of local dimming) or from an OLED TV like the S95F or the LG G5 with no light bloom.

(Credit: Hieronymus Bosch, Will Greenwald)

The Frame Pro is far from ideal for watching video, but it excels as a digital picture frame. I looked closely at several works of art by Hieronymous Bosch and Rene Magritte through the Samsung Art Store, and I was taken by the detail and realism. They looked like well-lit versions of the actual paintings, and while I haven’t seen any Bosch firsthand, I will say Magritte’s “The Menaced Assassin” on The Frame Pro is a spitting image of the actual work at the MoMA. Photos also look excellent, evoking a picture in a frame instead of a glowing TV.

A 144Hz refresh rate makes The Frame Pro attractive for gaming on paper, but the Wireless One Connect Box holds it back in this regard. Using a Leo Bodnar 4K Video Signal Lag Tester, I measured an input lag of 21.2 milliseconds with a 1080p120 signal and 36.2ms with a 4K60 signal, with Game Optimizer (Samsung’s Game mode) enabled. We consider one frame of latency (16.6ms for 4K60, 8.3ms for 1080p120) or less best for gaming, and The Frame Pro lags nearly three frames in both cases. That’s a very high lag, only rivaled among TVs I’ve tested by the QN990F (24.1ms at 1080p120, 37.1ms at 4K60). The common feature of both TVs is the use of the Wireless One Connect Box, so I have to conclude that a wireless video connection simply adds too much latency to make a TV very suitable for video games.