Spot the television

When you’re done watching The Good Wife or Iron Fist , there’s no reason why your television should go back to being a big black slab dominating the room with all that nothingness. At least Samsung Electronics doesn’t think so. Instead, the company offers a new way to put the blank TV to work to beautify your room and fit right in with your lifestyle at home.

“The Frame” as it’s called actually won Samsung the innovation award at the CES event earlier this year and you can see why when you find yourself barely able to tell the difference between the television framed and hung up on the wall and all the paintings surrounding it. To achieve this look, the TV is, first of all, perfectly flat. When put up, there’s zero gap between it and the wall. Heating is controlled so as to not be a problem and there’s no unsightly mess of cables anywhere to be seen as they’re replaced by a single invisible optical cable. With clean space all around it, the TV is now free to display artwork from artists with whom Samsung has collaborated for the use of their work. Unless you know or something moves on the screen, it’s really difficult to tell that the TV isn’t a painting.

The Frame’s look is achieved by actually putting replaceable bezels on the TV — and these are to be bought separately and can be changed by the user. The Frame can be made of regular wood or other frame-friendly materials but then it’s the software on the television that gives the artwork borders and adjusts lighting and tone to the ambient lighting in the room to finish the look.

An immediately obvious question would be why would you want to waste power keeping a television on just so it can decorate the room, but that’s not what happens. The TV senses when someone is in the room and wakes up only to sleep again when there’s no one around. The power it takes up is, according to Samsung, about as much as from a set-top box that isn’t completely powered down. When in Frame mode, a low power consumption mode kicks in if the unit is displaying a painting.

Samsung actually launched its new premium televisions this month in Paris, choosing it because it’s the City of Lights and because of the Parisians love for art. In fact, the launch venue was just under the famous museum where the Mona Lisa lives, the Carrousel de Louvre.

A frame isn’t enough to make a display look good and so Samsung has upped the ante where display technology is concerned, throwing a bit of a challenge to rivals Sony, Panasonic and LG who use the OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) technology. Samsung coined a new acronym, QLED to refer to the use of Quantum Dots technology, which the company is using in its new range of high-end televisions.

While OLED is a technology by which tiny carbon diodes are put inside each individual pixel to emit light when an electrical current is applied to them, QLED is a technology in which quantum dot colour enhancement material is built right into the diodes themselves to display extremely rich, bright and also subtle colour variations. Colours are capable of showing as vivid as well as soft and detailed at up to 2000 nits of peak brightness according to Samsung — brighter than what other technologies can manage.

Samsung is positioning its new QLED televisions as lifestyle products, focusing on style and connected smartness apart from sheer picture quality. “With state-of-the-art style, smart features, and picture quality, our 2017 lineup is truly ushering in a new era for television,” said HS Kim, president of Visual Display Business at Samsung Electronics. Samsung is using the terms Q-Picture, Q-Style and Q-Smart to talk about features in these categories.

The QLED TVs will be available in a variety of formats and sizes including curved and flat models in 55 and 65 inches. The TV models include the Q8C curved display in 65 inches, the Q7C curved display in 55 inches, and the Q7F, which is 55 inches and flat. These may possibly come to India in May.