I own a Frame, and the normal viewing mode does have a very slight brightness adjustment that is automatic, I think I turned that on. It's not as dramatic as the Art Mode setting.

The art mode dimming is very good, it has tricked every single visitor I've had in my living room, they always say nice painting. Then their minds are blown when it's revealed it's a TV. It's very convincing at first glance.

Problem is showing personal images, it does not do as good of a job. I think it uses the same settings as other inputs.

I would bet the art mode pictures are analyzed somehow to optimize the settings, or the settings are hand-tuned for each picture.

Not applying art mode to arbitrary user pictures removes the risk of them making art mode look bad, when art mode is pretty much the main reason to buy this TV over another.

But they advertise Art Mode as "you can add your own pictures" :/

Aww, that's what I feared after the reviews always just raved about the art mode. If it doesn't even work so well for imported images, even worse.

Well, that's one expensive toy expense saved I guess.

Also, my frame at least has some kind of broken internal Wifi.. so using it as a tv with the internal apps is annoying, I have to almost daily factory reset it to get it to reconnect to our (otherwise fine) WiFi and stream stuff... :/

Ah yes I turned off all the "smart" features I could. I don't trust Samsung with anything. I use a Chromecast for streaming needs, it's very reliable.

From my limited exposure, my best guess is that whatever lighting / contrast adjustments it makes in art mode are only enabled for art mode.

I'm not sure what 'looking natural' for a television screen might look like. Naively, if you wanted the television mode to look more like moving pictures, I'd think you'd have to figure out a way to knock down the refresh rate considerably. 15Hz ought to do it. If you're asking me if it just adjusts the television brightness to surrounding lighting conditions, I don't know, but it feels like art mode is doing more than just adjusting brightness (though possibly I'm wrong here and brightness is just much more convincing than I've experienced in the past)

Ah, too bad. I had hoped for something that could display a slideshow from a Raspberry Pi etc, since I'd want the content to update automatically in regular intervals and not rely on cloud services.

IIRC you can add your own 4K images to it via thumb drive and it'll rotate through them without relying on a connection to their upstream art server.

Take this with grains of salt as I don't own one, don't know the interval, and couldn't guarantee that it isn't bricked without an internet connection, though I find that highly unlikely.

I guess for automatic updates one could simulate a USB drive and send remote control commands, but that feels a bit too hacky and disruptive for something where sleekness is the focus. Thanks for your responses!