Amazon has re-branded its line of Fire TVs as Ember TVs, and the latest Ember TV entry, the Samsung Frame competitor Artline, is set to launch in the coming weeks.
Amazon released several new Fire TVs last year, including new versions of the Amazon Fire TV Omni QLED, the Amazon Fire TV 4 series, and the Amazon Fire TV 2 series. These TVs will be re-branded under the Ember TV name. So expect names to read like Amazon Ember QLED, Amazon Ember 4 series and so on.
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So on to the next piece of news: the Amazon Ember Artline TV is the company’s version of the Samsung Frame. While the Samsung Frame may not offer the picture quality and features of the very best TVs, its Art Mode, where artwork is displayed on standby instead of a black screen, is extremely popular. 2,000 artworks will be available at no extra charge. There’s also a ‘Match The Room’ feature, which uses AI to find a piece of art that matches the TV’s surroundings.
First impression of Artline
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We recently got our first look at Artline in person, and the results were… mixed. It wasn’t an extensive preview by any means, but we were shown a scene from Prime Video’s The boys and the first thing we noticed was that the matte screen was too glossy, resulting in the demo scene being very hard to see.
The art itself looked very nice on it though. We also saw the Artline with a brown-wood design frame on it (one of 10 colors), which again looked fantastic, made even better by the included near-flush wall bracket, which fit tight and nice to the wall. There’s a chunky black section below the bezel that takes away from the slimness a bit, but this houses the sensor for Omnisense, where the TV turns on and off when motion is detected in the room.
The big talking point is the price. At $1,099/£1,199 for the 65-inch model, this is significantly more expensive than a well-specced mini-LED such as the TCL QM7K/C7K, which costs $799/£749 at the time of writing. These boast features from the best gaming TVs, such as 4K 144Hz support and a mini-LED backlight for images that are brighter, with more vibrant colors and more refined contrast.
However, Artline is not alone in this, as these increasingly affordable mini LED TVs make them a very tempting proposition, especially considering their features and performance. While our first impressions of the Artline were mixed, we’ll reserve full judgment once we get it for a test drive. Still, the art TV market is getting even more crowded with TCL, Hisense and now Amazon all going after Samsung.
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