By George McClure
Packed with an ever-evolving variety of content and features and built with intuitive technology, Samsung’s lineup of Smart TVs simplifies working and learning from home while making streaming, gaming, movies and sports more amazing.
Samsung topped the global TV market for the 18th consecutive year in 2024. I recently sat down with James Mayo, Executive Director of Custom Install Channel Sales at Samsung Electronics America, and discussed the company’s latest offerings.
“Samsung, on all six of our lifestyle lines – and even with our flagship products – has found a way to hide the television in plain sight and make it work best for your unique space and setup. And, even better than that, these screens are interactive when off. And, you know, you can make art, you can have it retract into the ceiling, you can stand it in the corner, you can rotate it, use it like a phone. It’s really interesting the things we’re doing.”
George McClure: Samsung kind of took the Audio Video design world by storm years ago with the introduction of The Frame TV, in which a wall-mounted flat-panel TV could be used to display various types of artwork. How did that come about?
James Mayo: The Frame is all about customization, giving you the ability to express your creativity and unique style preferences. It challenges the idea that your TV is simply a black box in your space, and instead allows you to put art in more places and expand where you place screens in a room. It marries both form and function; a TV when it’s on, art when it’s off – creating an entirely new category of TV. For the design community, this new category has greatly expanded their world of possibilities and provided more creative freedom. I mean, Samsung’s job is to provide more options, make the product more flexible, and give consumers more reasons to buy TVs. With The Frame, we do exactly that.
We’ve made a number of improvements to The Frame over the years, as well — improved picture quality, improved flexibility, added new bezel options for the TV. One of the best innovations was adding the Anti-Reflection with Matte Display. Normally, in a bright room, the glass on a TV has reflections, so you can kind of see yourself in the TV or see the window if you’re looking at it on an angle, right? The Matte Display completely eliminates that reflection.
We also offer the subscription-based Art Store, which at this point now has over 2,500 pieces of art from world-renowned galleries and artists – everything from Salvador Dali to Keith Haring, even Jean-Michel Basquait. We actually have an Art Store curator on staff, who will hand select special curations – it’s really impressive. So, designers can confidently treat The Frame like a piece of art. It really looks more like a painting, like a piece of fine art.
With the Matte Display, every artwork also looks just like it’s hanging in a museum. Or, if you prefer – you can also put your own digital files up on it — you can take family photos and put them up. New this year, we enhanced The Frame with Pantone Art Validated Colors, so that every piece of artwork you display appears even more natural and realistic – exactly as the artist intended. Plus, we introduced a new complimentary Streams feature that gives viewers a taste of the Art Store’s diverse collection. Each month, you can check out 20 or more free hand-selected artworks from the full collection, curated by our professionals.
The bezel is also customizable – we have several different colors and textures to match your desired aesthetics. Or you can choose from a variety of different sizes to best fit your space. When we first launched The Frame, we offered just two screen sizes, 43 and 50 inches. Now, we have seven: 32, 43, 50, 55, 65, 75 and 85 inches. Every detail is really tailored for you.
Interior designers know all too well that many wall-mounted TVs end up above the fireplace or off in the corner of the great room. The Frame really opened things up. We’re now seeing these amazing spaces with The Frame in the dining room, in the kitchen, in the hallway, in the bathroom — wherever you would put a piece of artwork.
It’s been a wonderful success for us, and it’s often a great entry point for designers to begin working with Samsung.
George: Let’s talk a little bit about your other TVs, starting with your cutting-edge MicroLED sets.
James: From phones, to refrigerators, to ships, to buildings, to televisions – Samsung makes more than you can imagine. For our screens, we are always pushing the envelope to new technology. MicroLED is the pinnacle that’s available in the world today for picture quality and serves as an absolute showstopper for any room it’s placed in. Featuring a slim, bezel-less design, the screen is engineered to fit perfectly against the wall. It perfectly blends into its surroundings.
This year, we introduced the new MS1B (89 101-inch class) and MS1C (114-inch class) screens – giving consumers even more ways to elevate their home cinema. It’s really amazing. These screens look like you can reach your arm into it — it’s just so deep and rich with colors and the blacks are perfect; it’s everything you want in a television.
MicroLED even uses an advanced Micro AI Processor, so it can use AI to upscale your picture into stunning 4K resolution. Plus, it creates ultra-realistic texture and dimension. It looks like it has nearly infinite shades of color, so you’re not just watching your favorite content – you’re living it.
So, this technology is really where television is going. And it’s flexible. In the not-too-distant future, we envision that you’ll be able to buy a certain number of MicroLED panels and put them together yourself, and then if you wanted it bigger, you could buy a few more panels and just attach them, and you could make the display any shape you wanted. That’s the idea for the future of MicroLED.
In addition to MicroLED in our lineup, we also offer our Samsung Neo QLED 8K and Samsung Neo QLED 4K screens. What you’re getting with a Neo QLED is the broadest array of colors available. These TVs also use AI in a unique way to upscale the picture for you, so you can transform what you’re watching – even older, standard and high-definition classics – into mind-blowing 8K or 4K resolution.
George: Yes, with AI, the up conversion is so good.
James: Exactly. You know, most content from broadcast and cable networks is still in 1080p. With up-conversion, what we really mean is that the newest Samsung TVs can use AI to upscale every piece of content into beautiful 4K or 8K, no matter the original format. With Samsung Neo QLED 8K specifically, it really demonstrates how anyone can experience 8K entertainment, with or without native content. For me, it’s been amazing to see old classics – like Cheers or Friends – transformed in ways never thought possible.
George: What’s next in the lineup?
James: There’s OLED — it stands for organic light emitting diode. In basic terms, OLED produces deeper blacks and softer colors, which is so important when watching movies. Historically, you had to watch an OLED TV in a darker space because the screen’s inky blacks could make ambient lighting in a room more obvious. Like, you probably wouldn’t put that in the main room in your house with big nine-foot windows. That really wasn’t what it was designed for.
This year, we took inspiration from the anti-reflective technology we put on The Frame, which we talked about a little earlier, and made it available in our S95D series – introducing the industry’s first OLED Glare-Free technology. So now designers can take that OLED with the deeper blacks and softer colors and put it in a bright room and get no reflection on it. They no longer have to contend with lighting considerations when specifying an OLED TV for their space. Bring on those massive windows or add as many lights as you want. Regardless of lighting condition or environment, the S95D remains nearly glare free.
OLED Glare-Free has no negative effects on your viewing angle or contrasts and no color distortion. In fact, its colors are, like The Frame, validated by Pantone. We’re actually the only TV brand to have Pantone validation on our screens. We’re pretty proud of the fact that we’re offering this now, and in what we believe is the best OLED product available in the market, another great option from Samsung.
George: Samsung has some other great lifestyle-oriented solutions. Let’s start with the outdoor TV line.
James: Yeah, it’s really a fascinating thing. We came out with The Terrace, our first outdoor TV, about four years ago. We were in Korea and we were asking the engineers, what’s next? What else should we be doing that we’re not thinking about? And our residential technology design partners at those meetings came out and said, you know, why haven’t you made an outdoor TV yet? They sent engineers to us, and in six months, The Terrace TV was born. I mean, to go from just a suggestion at a meeting in an executive room to a produced product line in that short a period is really a remarkable strength of this company.
And it’s not easy to make a good outdoor set. For example, if you’re designing an outdoor patio, you might think that opting for a regular TV in the space would work out just fine. But you probably won’t like it when, in an effort to protect the screen, your masterpiece is disrupted by an unsightly TV cover or worse a trash bag or towel! We’re not into that, of course. Instead, we intentionally designed The Terrace to be outdoor-optimized. There’s different levels of dust resistance and water resistance. All our sets are rated IP55 or IP56. The first number is dust resistance and the second is water resistance.
George: Tell us about the Sero and Serif TVs.
James: The Sero is a favorite with the younger generation. It allows them to experience the content from their phone on a bigger screen. And what’s really cool is that you just push one button on your phone and the TV rotates from portrait orientation to landscape, and vice versa. And, of course, you can use it as a regular television. It’s mobile, you can buy a set of wheels for it so you can move it around the room — it’s not mounted to a wall. The entire base of the product is a giant speaker, so it creates great sounding music. It’s been a really fun product for us. We’ve actually seen that nearly two-thirds of people with The Sero use it to watch video shorts.
Designers appreciate the distinctive, elegant look of the Serif, which can be placed literally anywhere in a room. You can stand it on a counter or on the easel that comes with it, and the wire runs up one of the legs. Or use it as a partition in your space to make a statement. Again, it’s all about design versatility, letting designers’ imaginations run wild with a TV that’s made to fit in and stand out anywhere it’s used.
George: I’ve also noticed Samsung has been introducing more “super big” screens lately. Can you share more about your business strategy?
James: Well, just a few years ago, 65-inch TVs were considered ‘big.’ Today, people want to go even bigger – they’re looking for TVs that are 85 and 98 inches. Large screens are actually among the fastest growing segment in the TV industry.
Not all large screens are created equal, but Samsung is the #1 TV brand for a reason. We’re always innovating to make sure that no matter which screen you go with, you can shop with confidence knowing that you’ll get leading picture quality, cutting-edge audio, advanced connectivity and sleek design – plus great features that are really valuable and innovative.
As an example – all of our 98-inch TVs are built with Supersize Picture Enhancer, which optimizes picture quality for the bigger screen. Naturally, as screens get larger, so do the thousands of pixels that make up the screen itself. Supersize Picture Enhancer can increase sharpness and reduce visible noise across every scene so you can enjoy what you’re watching without any pixel distortion, even at the larger size.
It’s all about giving people more choice to find the right TV to fit their day-to-day needs.
George: Anything else you’d like to tell us about?
James: Yes. Today it’s very challenging for retailers to put up a complete array of product options and show all that Samsung has to offer. So, we have created some Design Centers around the country. We have one in Dallas, one in Irvine, California, and one in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey. They’re open to all designers to use any time they want with their clients. We also partner with some of our rep firms to use their facilities in various markets, including Phoenix, Oakland and Denver, with several more coming — one out on Long Island, one in Chicago, and one in Fort Lauderdale. These facilities are open to any designer who wishes to come in with a client and their technology design partner, with no commitment to buy, but really just to show the options in the best environment possible.
I also wanted to mention that I think we’re the only company out there that has active product in six different categories of what we’re referring to as Lifestyle Televisions, which is a distinct differentiator for us. When I say lifestyle, what I mean is – we have unique TVs and screens for any lifestyle, any space, and any preference. And that’s why I think we do really well in the systems integration channel. At Samsung, we recognize that no two homes are the same – and no two installations will be either.
That’s why more and more designers are finding their way to those products. You know, when many people think of a TV, they’ll envision a big rectangle on the wall. But Samsung, on all six of our lifestyle lines – and even with our flagship products – has found a way to hide the television in plain sight and make it work best for your unique space and setup. And, even better than that, these screens are interactive when off. And, you know, you can make art, you can have it retract into the ceiling, you can stand it in the corner, you can rotate it, use it like a phone. It’s really interesting the things we’re doing. Our TV customers are the same design-forward clients the design-build community is working with. We know their choices in technology and TVs are just as important as the furniture they choose and the décor – it needs to seamlessly complement their homes and give them more choice to find the right TV that works for them. Samsung is delivering exactly that, and we’re always excited to work with designers to expand value for their clients with our lineup.
