Stick a beautiful TV on a wall and you're left with a problem — you still have a TV on a wall. A big, black expanse of powerless pixels that tells someone that you care about watching TV the right way in your home. But you don't care so much as to hide the TV when it's not in use.
(Or, to be fair, you're probably like the vast majority of us and can't really afford to care that much. But I digress.)
Companies have attempted to do something about this, of course. Samsung has "The Frame," which basically sticks a TV inside of a picture frame and turns it into a piece of art when you're not watching video. And that's not a bad way of going about it.
And at CES 2020, LG unveiled its own take on TV-as-art, with the OLED-powered GX Gallery series of televisions. It comes in three flavors — 55, 65 and 75 inches — and hangs flush on a wall.
And this is one of those times in which LG did something so simple that it makes you wonder why someone would take the opposite tack. Instead of embedding the panel in something that looks like a typical picture frame (and Samsung's has its logo on it, of course) LG has opted for virtual picture frames. That is, the television itself displays the frame as well as the art inside.
That allows for a couple things. First it means that there's no thick picture frame-style bezel that's always in view, whether you're oogling the art, or actually watching television in the traditional sense.
And that also allows for the picture frames to change from art piece to art piece. And I'm digging that idea. Different paintings have an entirely different feel depending on how they're framed. And if you're going so far as to have a virtual art gallery on your wall that's able to continuously change, why not the frame around the art, too?
It's a simple answer to a problem that perhaps has been overcomplicated until now.
What it can't do, though, is figure out how you're going to afford it. No word on pricing or availability just yet. But it's an OLED joint, it's not going to be cheap.
Then again, good art never is.
