Samsung’s The Frame has been enormously popular ever since its release. There’s no shortage of imitators at this point, with other manufacturers trying their hand at creating a TV that seamlessly blends in with home decor and can also convincingly look like wall art when idle. But none have captured lightning in a bottle quite like Samsung.

And in 2025, Samsung is looking to fend off copycats by introducing The Frame Pro. With the artwork side of things well handled, now the company is aiming to make The Frame Pro a good TV for everything else. The Frame has nailed the aesthetics and style from the start. People buy it for the vibe more than anything else. But as a TV, it’s always just been, well… fine. There wasn’t much wow factor in terms of brightness or the overall picture quality that came with the nice design. That might be changing now.

There are two main upgrades that put the “pro” in The Frame Pro. First, Samsung is moving to Mini LED, which the company says will give The Frame Pro a boost in contrast, brightness, and black levels. The regular Frame, which isn’t going anywhere, has never offered any local dimming to speak of.

But there’s an important caveat: this isn’t Mini LED in the regular sense. Normally, Mini LED TVs contain a ton of small dimming zones behind the screen. This lets them be way more precise in lighting up only the sections of the display that need it while preserving black levels and shadow detail elsewhere. The Frame Pro doesn’t do that.

Instead, Samsung is placing Mini LEDs along the bottom of the screen, while claiming that this approach still produces some level of local dimming. To me, it all still very much sounds like an edge-lit TV. But I’ll give this “Mini LED” tech a fair chance whenever I get one in for review.

Samsung is also boosting The Frame Pro’s maximum refresh rate from 120Hz to 144Hz, so PC gamers can get even smoother visuals than before. But if you were hoping “pro” might finally mean Dolby Vision support, that’s still a no.

The Frame has always been something of a compromise; maybe you’ve got a significant other who refuses to allow a dull black rectangle into the living room. So you, being the good and considerate person you are, ultimately agree to “settle” on The Frame. After first hearing about The Frame Pro, I was hopeful that it would be much less of a compromise.

But this asterisk around Mini LED has me a little less excited. Like recent models, The Frame Pro’s display has a matte finish to give your preferred art a more authentic appearance and mask the reality that you’re looking at a screen. But matte screens can sometimes lessen a display’s punch, so genuine Mini LED backlighting could’ve helped quite a bit in that regard.

The second major improvement is that The Frame Pro no longer has a thin wire running between it and Samsung’s breakout box that houses all the HDMI inputs and the TV’s other brains: that connection has gone fully wireless. This will result in an even cleaner look with less cable clutter. And the Wireless One Connect Box, which supports up to Wi-Fi 7, eliminates yet another telltale sign that The Frame Pro is a television. Now, all you’ve got to worry about concealing is the display’s power cord. Samsung says the wireless connection between the box and TV works at distances of up to 10 meters, “even with obstacles in its path.”

The Frame Pro is also getting the same litany of AI-powered features as Samsung’s other 2025 TVs. AI is such a focus this year that there’s a dedicated button on the remote for activating Click to Search, which can show you “who the actors are in a given scene, where that scene is taking place, or even the clothing the characters are wearing,” according to Samsung’s press release.

A new Samsung Food feature can recognize dishes onscreen and provide you with the recipes to make them — or something in the same ballpark, at least. Beyond that, the company is dialing up its AI-enhanced picture and sound optimizations, and AI is also reaching into accessibility features like Live Translate, which can “instantly translate closed captions on live broadcasts in up to seven languages.” That’s very neat.

The critical question is one I can’t answer yet: how much will this thing cost? How much more expensive will The Frame Pro be compared to the regular model? Samsung won’t be sharing pricing details until closer to the spring when it ships. If the company gets cocky and goes too high, that could ruin a lot of the appeal here. But if you already know that some version of The Frame is in your future, you’re probably very happy that The Frame Pro now exists.

Photography by Chris Welch / The Verge