There’s a bit of a trap for movie buffs weighing the pros and cons of the best TVs. Generally speaking, the bigger the screen, the better the experience (assuming your room is spacious enough), but larger sets are undeniably an eyesore when not in use.
Until rollable or transparent panels become cheap enough to be in every home, the best thing to do is hide big screen TVs in plain sight. Samsung popularized this with The Frame, a TV that transforms into framed digital art when not in use. But it costs a pretty penny and, as a QLED panel, doesn’t offer the same contrast as the best OLED TVs.
HiSense has announced CanvasTV, which promises a similar but cheaper experience. Would this be a real competitor? Here’s how the two compare.
Hisense CanvasTV vs Samsung The Frame: Price, size and availability
The Frame, as a family of TVs, has been around since 2017. But the latest version, The Frame 2024, has only been available for a month and arrives on April 4. It’s available in five sizes, starting at $999 for the 43-inch. model, and comes in at $2,999 for the massive 75-inch version.
Although Hisense’s CanvasTV starts at the same price when released, that’s a bit misleading. It only comes in two sizes: 55-inch and 65-inch, which cost $999 and $1,299, respectively. For comparison, the two equivalent Samsung models will cost you $1,499 and $1,999, a difference of $500 and $700.
There’s no exact release date for CanvasTV, but Hisense says it will launch “in late summer.” It makes no sense until September 22, if the company doesn’t play fast and loose with the definition of seasons.
Both TVs offer additional frame-style bezels at an additional cost, to make them even more gallery-like.
Hisense CanvasTV vs Samsung The Frame: Design and Specs
The idea behind both TVs is the same. Rather than prioritizing brightness, the goal is for them to be credible as framed art when not in use. With that in mind, both use anti-glare display technology to try to mimic the texture of real paintings in their respective arty modes.
Both offer 4K resolutions using QLED technology, both support ALLM and VRR and both will offer multi-channel 2.0.2 surround sound.
Based on the specs released at the time of writing, the big difference is in the refresh rate. While The Frame 2024 has a maximum of 120Hz (or, reasonably, 60Hz in Art mode via VRR), CanvasTV has a native refresh rate of 144Hz. Unless you plan to use it as a monitor for PC gaming, which would be odd for an art-style TV, is mostly for bragging rights, but it’s interesting that Hisense can offer such a benefit for less money.
Of course, TVs are more than just raw specs that often don’t tell the whole story. We’ll have to wait until we get our hands on the Hisense to see the picture quality in person, but we have some early measurements of Samsung’s latest The Frame:
| Row 0 – Cell 0 | The 2024 Framework |
| SDR Brightness (10%, in nits) | 355 |
| Delta-E (lower is better) | 1.88 |
| Rec. Coverage of the 709 range | 99.96 |
| HDR Brightness (10%, in nits) | 590 |
| Coverage of the UHDA-P3 range | 91.9 |
| Rec. Coverage of the 2020 range | 68.15 |
| Input lag (ms) | 9.2 |
Hisense CanvasTV vs Samsung The Frame: software
This is another point of difference. While The Frame uses a proprietary Samsung operating system, the Hisense alternative will run Google TV. This gives it a little more flexibility, but Samsung has been in the TV business for a long time and its TV software is pretty sophisticated at this point.
Arguably the main software to watch out for on an arty TV is the digital art it can display when not in use. In addition to being able to purchase more than 2,500 images, the Samsung Art Store will now offer a monthly selection of works that owners can view for free. Rather neatly, the Pantone Validated Artful Color certification means they’ll look pretty close to how they would in an actual gallery.
If you don’t want your living room to look like a tiny museum, you can also put your own pictures or photo albums there using the Samsung SmartThings app.
Hisense’s plans in this area are less clearly defined, but the company promises “a curated world of free artistic masterpieces with a collection of preloaded works spanning Abstract, Modern, and Renaissance styles.” Like The Frame, you can switch between artistic and personal photos, this time by pressing the “Artistic Mode” button on the supplied remote.
We’ve already mentioned that Samsung has an eye on power efficiency with its new variable refresh rate, and Hisense is thinking along the same lines. It comes with power-saving technology in Art mode to adjust the brightness via a power sensor, and a motion sensor will turn off the screen when no one is detected.
Hisense CanvasTV vs. Samsung The Frame: Outlook
On paper, Hisense CanvasTV looks more than just like Samsung’s The Frame. The revealed specs match or improve, and all for a lot less money.
But the word “revealed” does a lot of heavy lifting here: we just don’t know everything about it yet, and it’s possible that The Frame is superior on some hidden metrics. Even though it’s a dead end, the specs can’t tell you much: in practice, the image quality can be vastly superior from one to the other.
We just won’t know until we put both to the test. But that doesn’t make CanvasTV any less exciting, and it’s still worth keeping an eye on if you like the living room aesthetic and value over raw screen size.
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