Samsung Underplays Brilliant TV Feature

There are certain features you focus on when you’re shopping for a new TV – For most people the top concerns are screen size and price. Digging a little deeper to narrow the field they look at resolution, a recognizable brand name, and built-in apps like Netflix, Hulu, and now Disney+.

There’s a lot more that goes into designing a TV though, and often times the “little” features are really very clever but overlooked by consumers. Samsung’s Ambient Mode^TM seems to fall into that category.

We’ve all seen TV’s before that try to display something tasteful on the screen when no one is watching TV. Most often, they act as a picture frame to show your own pictures. None of them seemed to pull it off in a convincing fashion. The end result always seemed bulky, awkward, forced. Maybe that soured consumers on the whole concept. I would argue that the Samsung’s Ambient Mode feature makes it worth taking another look. I think Samsung’s finally hit the nail on the head in this effort.

Making an 82-inch TV Disappear

Ambient mode includes predictable capabilities like displaying your photos from your phone or from a Samsung Cloud account and displaying artwork, I’ll cover those a little more in a moment for the sake of completeness.

The biggest trick they pull off is making the TV disappear! That, in my opinion, is the most tasteful thing you can do with a TV when it’s not in use. Make it disappear.

This is accomplished by taking a picture of the wall with your phone, using Samsung’s SmartThings app. Once the TV knows what the wall looks like, it creates an image to replicate the wall on the TV screen. That leaves only the thin bezel visible, and just barely.

I saw this in a showroom recently, pushed back into an obscured corner on a smaller screen demo. It looked fabulous. I was surprised it wasn’t being demonstrated more prominently on a larger screen. When the wall of 50 TV’s are all displaying the overblown colors of demo mode, it would really stand out to have one TV in the group which practically invisible.

That replication of your wall can be used as the background, and it can be used as the basis for a more extravagant display if you prefer. The TV can create tasteful designs based on the color palette from your room and displays those in an artwork-like fashion. Superimposed on these you can display the time, the weather, or even the news. You can even modify attributes like shadow, hue, saturation of objects in the image.

In addition to it’s own created designs, you can choose from over 1000 pieces of “world-famous” artwork from an online store. There is a Special Edition which “Allows you to enjoy creative artwork and interior design content created by the world’s finest artists and designers.”

Finally, Samsung seems to have nailed making even your own photos look presentable. The simple touch they add is a realistic mat around the image. Your photo looks professionally framed and matted.

Ambient Mode on QLED Series

The Ambient Mode is available on their QLED series with the exception of the lowest model in the series, the Q50R. All of these TV’s are compatible all of the usual smart home technologies. It’s also available on The Frame, which is not a TV that is capable of disappearing. With The Frame, the idea is prominence, and the artwork aspects of Ambient Mode make more sense.

The QLED series consists of the Q50R, Q60R, Q70R, Q80R, and Q90R. Here’s a grid with links to QLED Series TV’s with Ambient Mode.

Note: Ambient Mode^TM is a trademark of Samsung.

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