Such has been the success of Samsung’s iconic gallery TV The Frame that competing TV brands are now falling over themselves to offer alternative versions of the product, with the latest to join the fray being Amazon.
The company has just announced a new Fire TV called the Amazon Ember Artline, which aims to mimic the appearance of a picture frame and act as a canvas for art pieces when in standby mode.
Amazon, which has been expanding its Fire TV lineup with more advanced Mini-LED and QLED models, has dubbed the Ember Artline as a “lifestyle TV for any room.” It borrows many of the aesthetic features found on The Frame, including an array of magnetic coloured bezels that snap onto the edges of the TV to change its appearance.
There is one major difference though. That would be the small rectangular box at the bottom of the TV, which is a kind of sensor that powers Amazon’s proprietary “Omnisense” technology to enable an ambient experience. Basically, it detects when someone enters or exits the room, and this allows it to automatically turn itself on or off at the appropriate time. It can even change the images it displays in standby mode for each household member, allowing everyone to customise the art they’d like to see.
The Ember Artline also integrates Alexa+ and features a far-field microphone to capture user’s voices from wherever they might be standing or sitting in the room to enable voice control without a remote control.
In terms of picture quality, the Ember Artline may have enough to rival Samsung’s The Frame, for it boasts a 4K QLED display that supports Dolby Vision and HDR10+, and it has a matte coating that helps to deflect ambient light away and prevent reflections from ruining the on-screen art. That’s a nice touch that Samsung first introduced on The Frame a couple of years ago and has since been copied by many of its rivals.
Amazon said the Ember Artline is just 1.5-inches thick, which means it’s pretty thin actually, enabling it to be hung almost flush to the wall. As for the artwork, Amazon said it has a selection of more than 2,000 pieces available in its art store, and users will also be able to connect the TV to Amazon Photos and display their own images. There’s an AI image creation feature too, so users can edit their own photos or create new pictures from scratch using natural language prompts.
There’s also a nice feature for those who are unsure what picture they should show. Users can take up to four photos of the wall where they’ve hung the TV, and the AI will analyze it to recommend pictures from its gallery that it thinks will best fit the decor and style of the user’s home.
As mentioned, users will also be able to choose what frame they want. Amazon is offering 10 different colour snap-on frames, including Ash, Black Oak, Midnight Blue, Fig, Matte White, Teak, Walnut, Pale Gold, Silver and Graphite. Users can choose which colour they’d like when they buy the TV, which is a major difference between it and Samsung, which forces users to take the default black option and buy other frames separately.
It’ll be interesting to see what impact the arrival of all of these new gallery TVs has on sales of Samsung’s The Frame. It could well be that the “gallery TV” segment just grows dramatically, for there are now dozens of options available. Just ahead of CES, LG announced its new Gallery TV, which is clearly modeled after The Frame, and Hisense and TCL have alternatives in the shape of the Canvas TV and the Nxtvision TV. For a more premium option, users might want to check out Skyworth’s Canvas Elite Art TV, which boasts a Mini-LED display.
Amazon said the Ember Artline TV will launch in the U.S., followed by the U.K., Canada and Germany. We don’t yet know the U.K. prices, but the 55-inch version is going to cost $899 (around £670) in the U.S. The company will also sell a 65-inch model, but it has not disclosed how much that one will cost.
It’s notable that Samsung offers a much more extensive range of size options for The Frame, including a massive 98-inch option, but Amazon may win out on value given that it’s notorious for undercutting its rivals on price. We’ll see when Samsung announces its prices for the 2026 The Frame and The Frame Pro later in the year.
