Samsung The Frame UE55LS003A: picture or TV?

Today, there is hard­ly a liv­ing room in which a large black TV would not be piled up. Even if you are used to the look of a black rec­tan­gle, you still can’t call it beau­ti­ful. The par­tic­i­pant of our today’s review is exact­ly what dif­fers from the rest.

Test results

TV that becomes invis­i­ble when turned off? No, this is not an idea from the writ­ers of Back to the Future, but a real Sam­sung The Frame TV (mod­el UE55LS003). In the CHIP test, this UHD TV demon­strat­ed the rich fea­tures, well-engi­neered Smart TV and ease of use of many Sam­sung mod­els. Pic­ture and sound qual­i­ty is also good, though not amaz­ing. No won­der, because the fea­ture of the prod­uct is com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent: in stand­by mode, a TV with an artis­tic frame instead of a body shows mas­ter­pieces of paint­ing, per­fect­ly fit­ting into your liv­ing room. Sam­sung wants a lot of mon­ey for this orig­i­nal idea.

Samsung The Frame UE55LS003A Test Results

Vernissage in the living room

Instead of a bor­ing black case, the Sam­sung UE55LS003A is equipped with a frame that resem­bles a pic­ture. It is attached to the wall with­out a gap, and the device can turn into a beau­ti­ful pic­ture on the wall in just a few sec­onds.. All you have to do is launch the so-called “artis­tic mode” and the 55-inch dis­play will dis­play a world-famous piece of art or a pho­to from your album of choice. The free col­lec­tion includes 100 paint­ings by 37 famous artists; oth­er paint­ings can be bought in the inte­grat­ed store. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, there is no slide show mode.

To ensure that the Sam­sung TV does not dif­fer from real pic­tures, it has a built-in bright­ness sen­sor that adjusts the back­light and col­ors of the dis­played pic­ture accord­ing to the ambi­ent light. The motion sen­sor, in turn, reg­is­ters when no one is in the room and auto­mat­i­cal­ly turns off the TV or acti­vates the image imme­di­ate­ly after motion is detect­ed. The unob­tru­sive frame design allows the device to stand out among real paint­ings and pho­tographs. How­ev­er, the stan­dard ver­sion with a black met­al frame does not look par­tic­u­lar­ly styl­ish, so Sam­sung quite trans­par­ent­ly hints at buy­ing an inter­change­able wood or met­al pan­el for the device. Cur­rent­ly, you can pur­chase five types of pan­els, each of which will cost almost 20,000 rubles.

Good UHD picture, but with an unpleasant drawback

The tech­nol­o­gy behind The Frame is based on the cur­rent Sam­sung Series 6. It uses a very good VA pan­el with UHD res­o­lu­tion (3,840 x 2,160 pix­els), which emits up to 486 cd/m². The max­i­mum con­trast ratio is 7.774:1, checker­board con­trast is 201:1. Thanks to HDR sup­port, col­ors appear espe­cial­ly rich and nat­ur­al. This is espe­cial­ly notice­able when play­ing Blu-ray. How­ev­er, the image qual­i­ty can’t be com­pared to top mod­els like the Sony KD-55A1 or the LG OLED 55E8. How­ev­er, the dif­fer­ences are vis­i­ble only in direct com­par­i­son.

The only (and very sad) draw­back is the dis­gust­ing image qual­i­ty when chang­ing the angle of view (due to the VA pan­el). As soon as you move away from the TV, the con­trast drops notice­ably. This is espe­cial­ly annoy­ing in art mode, because in this case the TV can no longer be dis­guised as a pic­ture — the dif­fer­ence is too notice­able.

It would be nice to improve the rel­a­tive­ly flat sound of two 10-watt speak­ers. This is where it makes sense to invest in a sound­bar or an exter­nal sound sys­tem.

UE55LS003A: well thought out

Aside from the lack of an ana­log audio out­put, the Sam­sung UE55LS003A offers great fea­tures. It has four HDMI out­puts, three USB ports and a dig­i­tal audio out­put. So that the out­puts do not vio­late the optics of the artis­tic frame, they are com­plete­ly hid­den in a sep­a­rate Sam­sung One-Con­nect-Box. Only a thin fiber optic cable and a pow­er cable lead to the screen. Con­trol is car­ried out either using a remote con­trol via Blue­tooth, or using voice, or through a smart­phone appli­ca­tion. All three options work flaw­less­ly and require almost no fur­ther expla­na­tion.

Noth­ing has changed with Sam­sung Smart TV. The oper­at­ing sys­tem is Sam­sung Tizen’s own devel­op­ment, very log­i­cal and pro­duc­tive. The Smart TV media cen­ter includes all pop­u­lar ser­vices, includ­ing Net­flix and Ama­zon Video, as well as many oth­er appli­ca­tions and games. The Inter­net con­nec­tion required to oper­ate the media cen­ter can be set up either via LAN or WLAN.

Energy consumption is normal

The Frame uses only 106W dur­ing nor­mal oper­a­tion thanks to its pow­er sav­ing tech­nol­o­gy, and pow­er con­sump­tion can be fur­ther reduced using the ECO mode. In stand­by mode, pow­er con­sump­tion is very low — only 0.2 watts. Of course, this is only true if the Sam­sung UE55LS003A is indeed dis­abled. In Art mode, pow­er con­sump­tion is slight­ly high­er depend­ing on the bright­ness lev­el of the image.

Alternative

Philips 55POS901F

The Frame is only worth the mon­ey if you real­ly want to have an art gallery at home for your guests. Sig­nif­i­cant­ly bet­ter pic­ture and sound qual­i­ty for the same mon­ey can be obtained by pur­chas­ing excel­lent OLED TV with wide view­ing angle and rich sound from Phillips. The 55-inch mod­el comes with rich func­tion­al­i­ty and an excel­lent Smart TV. The only thing - its pow­er con­sump­tion will be high­er than that of Sam­sung.

Samsung The Frame UE55LS003A Test Results

Features and test results of Samsung The Frame UE55LS003A

Pho­to: man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­ny