The 5 Best 40- to 49-Inch TVs of 2025

Key specs

Lots of modern TVs come equipped with “ambient” settings to show photos or artwork when you aren’t watching TV, but Samsung’s The Frame line has been the champion of the television-set-as-artwork approach for the past several years.

While the cost of entry is high — the 43-inch Frame, the QN43LS03BAF, retails for $1,000, and customizing the bezel color or accessing the full range of art options involves an additional cost — there’s nothing else like The Frame in this size range. You won’t find much like it in other size ranges, either.

Design and aesthetics are front and center here. With most higher-end TVs, such as our top picks above, manufacturers often overlook the TV’s physical design in favor of adding the technologies necessary to deliver blue-ribbon picture quality. By contrast, The Frame is as much a pleasingly designed object as it is a fully functional TV.

My review unit came equipped with the standard black bezel (it’s also available in much more interesting color variations, such as white, brown, or teak), but I still found it fetching. The Frame is roughly the same thickness as a traditional art frame, about 1 inch, which allows for extra care in the finish and brushing of the bezel.

The Frame is made to be wall-mounted, and its art-frame-inspired shape goes a long way toward the objective of passing as artwork at first glance. The package includes a slim-fit wall mount that holds The Frame flush against the wall, just like a painting. The box also includes tabletop feet, but this TV really comes alive on the wall.

The final piece of the puzzle is the OneConnect box, a separate piece of hardware containing all of the TV’s connections (such as HDMI and USB), which you can install up to 16 feet away. Though this component can introduce some planning difficulties because you need to run a single wire between the box and the TV, it’s what makes such a flush, on-wall aesthetic possible. You simply couldn’t plug cables in directly and achieve the same effect.

You can find better movie-night TVs, but The Frame is a good performer. Samsung has been updating and redesigning The Frame for the past six years, and though it hasn’t changed drastically in that time, the company has clearly attempted to keep its picture quality on pace with that of more contemporary TVs.

The company has outfitted the 43-inch Frame with as much advanced TV tech as possible without compromising its design intentions. Like our Samsung top pick above, this model is a 4K/HDR TV equipped with quantum dots for better color and software dimming to improve its screen contrast. In our testing it proved to be almost as bright as the LG C4 and capable of decent color saturation.

But because it uses edge-mounted LEDs instead of a full-array backlight in order to be thinner, it isn’t a great choice for watching darker movies in a very dim or dark room. The backlight’s operation is easy to see, which can spoil the sense of immersion.

The Frame also has a matte screen finish, which works impressively well to mitigate ambient light but keeps colors from popping with the same vividness as they do on bright TVs with glossier screens.

However, what most impressed me was how dim this TV could get without losing image fidelity. When it was displaying artwork, I could turn the screen brightness down so only a scant hint of illumination was perceptible, and the whole image maintained uniformity. Combined with the matte screen, this dimming function really bolsters the TV’s ability to masquerade as artwork on the wall.

It would be a shame not to game on The Frame. Despite The Frame’s artsy emphasis, it’s a surprisingly good choice for gamers, too. Our testing revealed very low input-lag numbers, around 10 ms when we were gaming in 4K at 60 Hz, and on this TV you get the same gaming dashboard found on the Samsung QN43QN90D.

However, the sometimes-obvious backlight fluctuation can be exposed more often when you’re playing fast-paced video games with rapidly changing scenes and light levels. The effect is less noticeable in a room with lights on, but for immersive gaming, Samsung’s The Frame comes nowhere near the level of our top picks.

If you do decide to plug in a video game console, you’ll at least have plenty of options: The Frame is equipped with four HDMI 2.1 inputs, so it plays nice with the latest gaming features such as variable refresh rate (VRR) and auto low-latency mode (ALLM).

Note, however, that you get a 120 Hz refresh rate only on the 55-inch and larger Frame versions. The 43-inch model is limited to 60 Hz.

Samsung’s art store is impressively robust. The Frame uses the same Tizen-based Smart Hub platform found on all Samsung smart TVs, but it replaces the standard Ambient hub with a unique Art hub where you configure and control the art experience.

Within that hub, you can find art to display across a huge range of categories and collections, including holiday themes, the Met, the Tokyo National Museum, or specific artists such as Degas, Renoir, and Van Gogh. You can even upload your own photos over USB or via smartphone.

While some aficionados have lamented the store’s lack of more modern artists such as Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, it offers plenty of choices for $5 a month (or $50 annually). But don’t take my word for it: New Frame owners get a two-month free trial to decide for themselves.

You can also buy individual works of art, but ownership doesn’t come cheap. Depending on what you’re buying, standalone artwork could cost as much as $25, which is already half the price of the annual subscription.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

The smart-TV platform could be snappier. I found that the Tizen smart-TV software wasn’t as smooth and responsive on my 43-inch Frame as it was on Samsung’s top-end TVs. Although that might not normally be surprising, we think it’s especially important that the software — which controls the various aspects of the TV-as-artwork functionality — be as reliable as possible.

In The Frame’s defense, the art-complementing features do require a potentially taxing amount of processing. The Frame needs to maintain a connection to Samsung’s extensive art store, for starters, and by default it employs both brightness and motion sensors (both of which you can shut off) to adjust its artwork to the ambient lighting in the room and to either wake up when it senses movement or shift into art mode when it doesn’t.

The good news is that everything works as it should, which can make for a luxe-feeling experience: Walking into the room and having The Frame wake from its convincing art display to resume TV operations is pretty snazzy.

The OneConnect box is ridiculously huge. Perhaps in order to remove as much hardware from the TV chassis as possible, Samsung has made the OneConnect box absolutely massive — almost as big as a shoebox. Tucking it away inside a TV stand or entertainment center wouldn’t be difficult, but where I mounted The Frame — on a wall in my kitchen near the dining table — I really had no good spot to place the massive box without rearranging furniture.

While the box’s large size may be an engineering necessity, it seems at odds with the design and intention of The Frame in general.