Samsung The Frame 2024 QLED TV Review

The Samsung The Frame 2024 is designed to look more like a framed piece of art than a traditional TV. It has black bezels, but you can buy covers that go over the bezels for a different color and finish. It also comes with the versatile One Connect Box (OCB) to connect all your devices and have one cable going to the TV to help keep your setup tidy.

As part of our two-year test, which has so far subjected 100 TVs to over 10,000 hours of accelerated testing, we found that edge-lit TVs like this one have significant durability issues. These issues range from warped reflector sheets and cracked light guide plates to completely burnt-out LEDs. You can read the full results of our investigation here.

The Samsung The Frame QLED uses two plastic feet that support the TV well. The height of the feet can be adjusted to two different positions. The lower position, which you can see in the photo, puts the screen close to the table and only lifts the TV about 2.05". The second position lifts the TV about 2.8", so most soundbars fit below the screen.

The footprint of the 65-inch stand is 42.5" x 10.28".

The back of the TV is plain and made entirely of plastic. There are square slots for the Slim-Fit Wall Mount, and this TV comes with Samsung's One Connect Box (OCB), which is separate from the TV and houses the inputs. The OCB is versatile and helps keep your setup clean.

The TV has excellent build quality. It's made entirely of plastic, but it feels solid overall. There's some wobble front to back when the TV is pushed, but this doesn't cause any issues. It's well-built overall, and there are no issues with quality control.

The Samsung The Frame 2024 has mediocre contrast. Its native contrast is good, but it lacks a local dimming feature. This causes blacks to be deep in dim and dark scenes, but they become raised and washed out when bright highlights are on the screen. The TV's contrast isn't as good as the Samsung The Frame 2022 QLED due to the light bleed in the corners of our unit that is causing black levels to rise, even in a dark room. You can see this here.

The TV doesn't have a local dimming feature, so there's no blooming around bright objects or subtitles during dark scenes.

This TV doesn't have a local dimming feature, so it can't adjust the backlight of individual zones to brighten up highlights without impacting the rest of the image. This means that there's no distracting flicker or brightness changes as bright highlights move across the screen.

Switching to Game Mode doesn't result in any noticeable difference in dark scene performance.

The Samsung The Frame 2024 has decent HDR brightness. It gets bright enough for some dimmer highlights to stand out, but it's not enough for bright highlights to pop. Combined with the TV's mediocre contrast, it doesn't provide an impactful HDR experience.

These measurements are after calibrating the HDR white point with the following settings:

• HDR Picture Mode: Filmmaker
• Brightness: 50
• Contrast: 50
• Color: 25
• HDR Tone Mapping: Static
• Color Tone: Warm 2
• Color Space: Auto
• Gamma: ST.2084 (0)

Results with HDR Tone Mapping set to 'Active':

• Hallway Lights: 421 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 382 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 212 cd/m²

The TV is slightly brighter in Game Mode, but it is less accurate.

These measurements are after calibrating the HDR white point, with the following settings:

• HDR Picture Mode: Game
• Brightness: 50
• Contrast: 50
• Color: 25
• HDR Tone Mapping: Static
• Color Tone: Warm 2
• Color Space: Auto
• Gamma: ST.2084 (0)
• Game HDR: Basic

Results with HDR Tone Mapping set to 'Active':

• Hallway Lights: 434 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 458 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 286 cd/m²

The Samsung The Frame 2024 has excellent PQ EOTF tracking. Blacks and near-blacks are slightly raised, while shadows, mid-tones, and highlights are displayed a bit dimmer than intended. With content mastered at 600 and 1000 nits, there's a gradual roll-off near the TV's peak brightness to retain detail in highlights. With content mastered at 4000 nits, the roll-off is much more gradual.

The Samsung The Frame 2024 has very good SDR brightness and is bright enough to overcome glare in a well-lit room.

These measurements are after calibration with the following settings:

• Picture Mode: Movie
• Brightness: 50
• Contrast: 45
• Color: 25
• Color Tone: Warm 2
• Gamma: 2.2
• Color Space: Auto

Unfortunately, when displaying a 2% window, the TV automatically adjusts the backlight and APL to enhance contrast, and there's no setting to disable this automatic adjustment.

The Samsung The Frame 2024 has a very good color gamut. It has outstanding coverage of the commonly used DCI-P3 color space, but reds, yellows, greens, and cyans are undersaturated. The TV has okay coverage of the Rec.2020 color space that is increasing in popularity, but almost all colors are undersaturated and off the mark.

The TV's color volume is decent. It doesn't display darker colors well due to its unremarkable contrast and can't display vibrant colors very brightly.

The TV has alright pre-calibration accuracy. Blues and greens are underrepresented in darker shades of gray, reds are underrepresented in all grays, and blues are a bit overrepresented in brighter grays. The color temperature is noticeably cooler than our target of 6500K, and all colors are off the mark in terms of accuracy. Gamma is close to our target of 2.2, but dark scenes are too dark, and bright scenes are a bit too bright.

The TV has outstanding accuracy after calibration. There are no noticeable errors with white balance, and the color temperature is almost perfect. Gamma is now very close to our target, but very dark and bright scenes are a little bit too bright. Color accuracy is better, but there are still some inaccuracies with all colors.

Unfortunately, the TV is a bit difficult to calibrate. When taking readings with a menu open that is out of frame, it would still affect the readings, which made the process quite tedious.

You can see our full calibration settings here.

The Samsung The Frame has good gray uniformity. The sides of the screen are darker than the middle, and there's some noticeable dirty screen effect towards the middle of the screen. On a very dark or near-black screen, its uniformity is very good, but the sides are noticeably brighter than the middle.

The TV's black uniformity is great, but there's no local dimming feature, so the entire screen is blueish and cloudy when bright highlights are on the screen. Unfortunately, there's some light bleed in the corners, affecting the TV's black uniformity and causing black levels to rise.

The Samsung The Frame 2024 has a mediocre viewing angle. There's significant gamma shifting and brightness loss as you move off-center, and colors look increasingly washed out as you move further away to the sides, so it's not a good choice for a wide seating arrangement. This also really affects the usefulness of the TV's 'Art Mode' since pieces of art look dim and washed-out when viewed from an angle.

The Samsung The Frame QLED has excellent reflection handling. Its matte coating does an outstanding job at significantly reducing direct reflections. With indirect reflections, light is scattered widely across the screen, and a large smudge of light negatively impacts picture quality.

The Samsung The Frame 2024 has fantastic HDR native gradient handling. There's no banding in any colors except dark grays, bright greens, and bright blues, but even with those, the banding is barely noticeable unless you specifically look for it.

The TV's low-quality content smoothing is decent. It does a very good job of preserving detail, but there's still noticeable macro blocking in dark scenes.

The Samsung The Frame 2024 does a good job at upscaling low-resolution content like DVDs or lower-resolution streams. Details are clear enough, but finer details are hard to make out.

Sharpness processing was calibrated with no over-sharpening for low-resolution content, with the following settings:

• Sharpness: 5
• Picture Clarity Settings: Off

The TV uses a BGR (Blue-Green-Red) subpixel layout instead of the traditional RGB layout. For video or gaming content, this doesn't cause any issues, but for PC monitor use, it can be a problem as it impacts text clarity, although not everyone will notice this.

The hazy pixels you see in the photo are caused by the TV's matte coating, but the haziness isn't noticeable when using the TV.

The Samsung The Frame 2024 has an excellent response time, with minimal motion blur behind fast-moving objects. Unfortunately, transitions in dark scenes are slow, which results in black smearing behind dark objects.

The TV uses pulse-width modulation (PWM) to dim its backlight, which introduces flicker that can bother people who are sensitive to it. The amount of flicker varies depending on what picture mode the TV is set to and what settings you're using. It flickers at a very fast 960Hz in the 'Movie' Picture Mode, but all other picture modes, including Game Mode, flicker at a much slower 120Hz, which can cause image duplications or headaches if you're sensitive to flicker. With 'LED Clear Motion' enabled, the TV only flickers at 60Hz.

The Samsung The Frame 2024 supports backlight strobing, more commonly known as black frame insertion (BFI). The feature is designed to improve the appearance of motion by strobing its backlight and reducing the amount of persistence blur. The BFI feature on the TV flickers at 60Hz, so there's still some image duplication present.

This TV has an optional motion interpolation feature to improve the clarity of motion. It does an okay job smoothing out slower scenes, but there are some noticeable artifacts present. In faster-moving scenes, it can't keep up, and there are distracting artifacts and haloing, and sometimes the TV stops interpolating altogether.

Due to the TV's fast response time, there's stutter with low frame rate content, which is most noticeable during slow panning shots. You can smooth out stutter using motion interpolation, but if you set it too high, you'll introduce noticeable artifacts.

The Samsung The Frame 2024 automatically removes judder from all sources when watching movies or shows that are in 24p, even if they're in a 60Hz signal, like from a cable box.

The TV supports all three types of variable refresh rate (VRR) technology to reduce screen tearing. It works well across a wide refresh rate range and supports sources with Low-Frame-Compensation (LFC), which ensures your games remain nearly tear-free even when your frame rate drops very low.

Unfortunately, there's an issue when using AMD graphics cards where the LFC doesn't activate when the frame rate drops below 48fps.

This TV has incredibly low input lag when set to Game Mode, which ensures a very responsive gaming experience with very little delay between your actions with your controller or mouse and the action on-screen. Unfortunately, 1440p @ 60Hz doesn't work while in Game Mode, so the 1440p @ 60Hz results are with the TV set to 'Movie,' which leads to a lot more input lag.

The Samsung The Frame QLED supports most common resolutions up to 4k @ 120Hz, but there are some caveats. Chroma 4:4:4 isn't supported in 1440p @ 120Hz, and there are occasional blackouts in 4k @ 120Hz when the TV is connected to a PC with an NVIDIA graphics card.

The Samsung The Frame 2024 is fully compatible with everything the PS5 offers, like 1440p @ 120Hz and 4k @ 120Hz, as well as HDMI Forum VRR. It also supports Auto Low Latency Mode, so you don't have to worry about switching to Game Mode to get the lowest input lag.

The Samsung The Frame 2024 is fully compatible with almost everything the Xbox Series X|S offers, including 4k @ 120Hz, HDMI Forum VRR, and FreeSync Premium Pro. It also supports Auto Low Latency Mode, so you don't have to worry about switching to Game Mode to get the lowest input lag. Unfortunately, 1440p @ 120Hz doesn't work when connected to an Xbox, and Dolby Vision isn't supported on the TV.

Although the TV supports HDMI 2.1 bandwidth on HDMI 4, it's limited to 40Gbps. In practice, this doesn't cause any issues or limitations with any current source. Unfortunately, Samsung still doesn't support Dolby Vision. However, it supports HDR10+ instead, which is similar overall but not as widely supported.

You need to connect all inputs to the One Connect Box, and there's a slot in the back of the TV to plug in the box. There's also a USB-C port on the back for service only.

The Samsung The Frame 2024 supports many audio formats, including all Dolby Digital options. Unfortunately, it doesn't support DTS formats, which is disappointing, as many Blu-rays use DTS for their lossless audio tracks.

The Samsung The Frame 2024 has a mediocre frequency response. Like most TVs, it doesn't produce much bass, but the sound profile is well-balanced enough that dialogue is clear at moderate listening levels. Unfortunately, the TV doesn't get very loud, and there are noticeable artifacts at maximum volume.

The TV's distortion performance is mediocre. Distortion is audible near and at max volume, so you need to listen at lower volume levels for no distortion.

The TV comes with the 2024 version of the Tizen interface. It's user-friendly and has a full page to display all the apps, and navigating through the menus is smooth.

You also have access to Samsung's Art Store to download artwork to display on the TV. It has over 50 paintings by default, but you must pay a subscription to download others. You can also upload photos and save them directly to the TV.

Like most TVs on the market, there are ads throughout the TV interface, and although you can turn off targeted ads, there's no option to turn them off entirely.

The Samsung The Frame 2024 has a great selection of apps, so it's easy to find your favorite content. You can also cast content from your phone onto the TV or play videos from a USB stick.

The remote is identical to the one included with most Samsung TVs, but it's white instead of black. It's slim and compact, has quick access buttons for the most popular streaming apps, and is easy to use. The remote has a built-in rechargeable battery with a solar panel on the back of the remote. You can also recharge it via USB-C if it dies unexpectedly.

The TV is compatible with the Bixby and Alexa voice assistants, and its remote has an integrated microphone for voice commands. You can use your voice to launch apps, switch inputs, ask for the weather and time, and adjust certain settings like the TV's brightness.

A single button is located at the bottom right of the TV. You can use it to power the TV on/off, change channels, adjust the volume, and switch inputs. You can control the TV hands-free with your voice using the TV's built-in microphone, but you can also turn the microphone off using a small switch on the bottom right of the TV.

• Manuals
• Remote
• Power cable
• One Connect cable
• Wall-mount equipment
• Cable management hooks