Samsung’s latest QLED TVs behave like a chameleon

Your TV is finally going to blend in with your living room decor

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Remember Samsung’s Frame TVs? Those TVs were designed to blend into your decor by masquerading as a beautiful piece of art work. For 2018, Samsung has taken things up to a whole new level, and this time your TV is really going to blend in with your room decor – as if it were a chameleon.

Ambient mode on Samsung’s 2018 QLED models capture an image of the area or wall directly behind the TV so that your TV can blend into its environment. So if your TV is mounted on a brick wall, it will mimic a background image of your brick wall!

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Ambient mode on Samsung’s QLED TV acts like a chameleon

Every TV manufacturer says that their TV is so well designed that it will blend in with your decor, but with Ambient mode, Samsung’s 2018 QLED TV really does blend in to a room without much distraction.

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Ambient mode features art that will react to the weather

Ambient mode has some other neat tricks. If it’s a gloomy day, the art on the TV will mirror that, if it’s sunny, it will reflect that too.

In addition to art that reacts to the outside world, you can create photo collages and have them running on the TV’s intelligent display when not in use – as a kind of digital picture frame of sorts. The TV can also show off the weather, and news headlines.

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You can display a personalized photo collage on the TV when it’s not being used

At Samsung’s First Look event today in New York, Samsung introduced customizable stands for their QLED TVs. So you’re no longer locked in to what the manufacturer gives you, and instead you have a selection of stands for your TV, which helps you further fit the TV into your decor.

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Can you spot the single cable coming from the TV? It’s nearly invisible

Samsung is also making a big deal about how their TVs allow for a single cable solution. Just a single, nearly invisible cable is necessary to keep a 2018 QLED TV, sound system and power all connected. So there’s no more messy cables and surge protectors required anymore. This allows you to place the TV just about anywhere – heck, you can use it as a room divider.

Bixby integration in the TVs and the new SmartThings App are another major focus of the 2018’s QLED TVs. You can tell Bixby to continue watching movies from your phone on your TV, all with a simple voice command. You can use Bixby to control your smart home appliances, for instance you can say “start Samsung vacuum”. Bixby can also be used to navigate the TV’s functions, e.g.: “go to ambient mode”, or “play my favorite song on Spotify.”

News headlines on the Samsung QLED TVs
News headlines on the Samsung QLED TVs

In addition to serving as a central control hub for your smart home devices, you can even use the SmartThings app to set up the apps on your TV. For example, you can use the app to connect Spotify on your TV. All of this is done through the SmartThings cloud. The idea here is that setting up your TV and its apps is going to be a very quick process. Samsung calls this effortless log in.

For PC gamers out there, there’s some good news too – built in Steam Link allows you to seamlessly stream your game onto your Samsung TV – from any room in the home.

Yes, Samsung did focus a lot today on the great picture quality that their new 2018 QLED TVs provide, but we’re more impressed with the TVs’ practicality. A TV that blends in without distraction? A TV that is super easy to set up? Sign us up.

Innovation in TVs has become pretty stale in recent years. The introduction of artificial intelligence and 8K has certainly spiced things up, but Samsung’s 2018 QLED TVs truly set the bar for TV innovation going forward, and that is because they aren’t just pretty, they are also super practical.