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Comment by esafak | Hacker News Reader

Samsung sells an LED TV specifically for this use case. Currently only at 4K.

https://www.samsung.com/us/tvs/the-frame/highlights/

I have one of these, and only in a very specific environment is it convincing as not-a-TV (aside from the concerns of privacy and their proprietary app).

Especially at night, I find the backlight makes it painfully obvious that it's just a TV and I'd much rather have something like e-ink which blends into the surroundings.

They look cool. Would be great to have an oled version without a backlight.

LED on oled stands for light emitting diodes, so they are a backlight.

"An OLED display works without a backlight because it emits its own visible light." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLED

While true, I think the original complaint about the backlight was more about the fact that the TV is emitting light, which a picture doesn’t do. OLEDs don’t solve that problem unless you want to display a black square.

The individual pixels (other than the black ones) would still emit light so it wouldn’t be convincing. A normal picture doesn’t emit any light.

A friend has the Samsung Frame and I think you can only interface with it via the Samsung SmartThings app. It's quite closed. So you need an online thing for the TV and then you upload it into their app.

Yep, it's very locked down, and Art Mode behavior is often anti-user to promote their $10/month Art Store subscription. There are limited matting options and I believe it intentionally crops photos incorrectly, even if you upload in the correct aspect ratio. It also takes about a minute to scroll down to 'User Art' sections with how slow their UI is.

Their Art Store promotion is annoying persistent but not actually required if you put images onto a USB and have it slurp them up; all you need to do is ignore their requests for subscription when setting it up. All that's required is to resize them to full screen with your own matte, or you can just crop the images to the right aspect ratio. Depending upon your desire for fidelity, you could also use ML image extension to get the right aspect ratio.

This doesn't get around all the other annoying bugs in the firmware of course.

They make it superficially closed but it's pretty simple to get around it with a USB drive. Really all you have to do is ignore their subscription system and size your images to match the screen.

Or a Pi

I’m browsing this link for a good 5min. Looks interesting. I get that it tries to simulate paper, but I have no idea how.

Even the “explore technology” link has little extra detail. I don’t even know if it’s backlit.

It’s just a tv with a picture frame and some additional software/wallpapers

Thanks. The selling copy in dumb because the product is.

It's just a TV with a matte screen and a way for Samsung to sell you public domain art.

The main tech is a very anti-reflective coating; the best I've seen on a mainstream TV. It is backlit but in Art Mode the backlight is turned down (you can control how much and there is an ambient light sensor that fine-tunes your choice). The combination of low emission, quite low reflection and static content is pretty compelling for me in a lit room.

I have the white frame on the bezel against a light-coloured wall and when displaying art it's much less imposing on the room than an empty black screen. Obviously it uses more power than standby but it's also quite a bit less than a dynamic screensaver.

Don't know that I'd get another one; the bugs in Samsung's software are annoying (I just want it to display the art, or a picture from a single HDMI input, how hard can they possibly make it?) but perhaps that's standard for modern TVs.

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