Samsung’s The Frame has a rival: now LG’s making OLED TVs into art

Our guide to the best OLED TVs may have a new arrival next year: LG has announced a new "Art" OLED TV which it calls the OLED Evo Object Collection and which has been designed to look beautiful when it's off as well as when it's on. It's going after the same customers as Samsung's The Frame TV, and it's designed for people who want the best TVs no matter how much they cost. 

In our Samsung The Frame TV review we called it a masterpiece, so I'm really fascinated by LG's approach: it's quite different and from what I've seen so far, quite delightful.

Putting the art into state of the art

Like the Samsung, the LG can display art or photos when you're not watching something. But LG's design is very different.

The LG 65ART90 can be stood on the floor, hung flat on a wall or leaned against it, and it has a fabric cover behind which there's a 4.2 80W audio system. That cover moves at the touch of a button to reveal or hide the screen, and to move between a full and partial display – so for example if you're listening to music you might only have enough screen visible to show the playback controls and song details.  

Will it be cheap? Nope! When it goes on sale in South Korea later this month it'll cost 9.9 million Won, which my currency calculator says is around £6,500 or $8,400 US dollars. 

It looks gorgeous, though, and I love the way LG is experimenting with the very shape of what could be the best TVs of the future: in addition to the Art, it's also been experimenting with moving speakers that switch TV ratios between 21:9, 16:9 and 4:3 and a sadly discontinued "wallpaper TV" that was just 2.5mm thick.