In its marketing material for the 32-inch Samsung The Movingstyle Essential ($699.99), the company uses the phrase "It's How We Roll." Indeed, when mounted on the shaft extending from its disc-shaped, wheeled base, this freestanding smart monitor can be rolled from room to room, and a 13-foot power cord makes it easy to connect to far-flung outlets. Although it doesn't have the image quality of the OLED-based Samsung Smart Monitor M9 (our Editors' Choice), it offers that display's wide range of smart features, a screen that's fine for presentations and everyday entertainment as well as light photo editing, and the mobility the M9 lacks. Plus, it comes in at a much lower price.

Design: A 4K Smart Monitor on a Stick

Design-wise, the Movingstyle resembles the LG StanbyME, a 27-inch 1080p "lifestyle" TV—a term LG uses to describe some of its televisions with unconventional designs—on a wheeled stand. The Movingstyle has a larger 32-inch vertical alignment (VA) flat panel (measured diagonally) with a 4K UHD native resolution of 3,840 by 2,160 pixels. A display with those specs has a pixel density of about 138 pixels per inch (ppi), enough for editing photos and illustrations.

The Movingstyle has a 60Hz refresh rate and lacks adaptive sync, so it's not ideal for gaming. According to Samsung, the monitor supports both vertical and horizontal viewing angles of up to 178 degrees. I saw no degradation in brightness or color fidelity, even at extreme off-axis angles.

The monitor's chassis is secured to the top of a 43-inch shaft that extends out of its 19-inch-diameter wheeled base.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

An articulating arm, secured to the top of the shaft, attaches to a VESA bracket that screws into the back of the monitor's chassis.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

This arrangement supports a wide range of mobility. Its height can be adjusted up to 8 inches; the screen can be tilted up to 90 degrees up or down; it can be swung up to 15 degrees to the left or right; and it can be pivoted from landscape to portrait mode and back.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The "moving" in Movingstyle is thanks to the stand, which features five urethane wheels on the bottom of its circular base. The base, pole, and arm together weigh 43 pounds. Its bulkiness could be seen as both a blessing and a curse, as much of the weight is concentrated in the base to prevent the monitor from tipping over. It seemed stable enough the times when I moved it, though you will want to treat it gently. Although the Movingstyle is primarily geared toward home users, in an office, it can be wheeled through hallways and moved between conference rooms.

Alternatives: How the Movingstyle Fits Into Samsung's Smart Monitor Lineup

The Movingstyle is essentially the same as the Samsung M7 32-inch smart monitor ($399), except that the latter is about $300 less, is designed as a stationary monitor with a conventional desktop stand, and lacks the rolling base and 13-foot cord.

The Editors' Choice-winning Samsung Smart Monitor M9 ($1,600) also has a 32-inch 4K screen, a host of smart-monitor features enabled by Samsung's Tizen operating system, and access to the Samsung TV Plus content ecosystem (which requires setting up a free Samsung account). Its quantum dot OLED (QD-OLED) provides magnificent contrast and superb color coverage, and it has a 120Hz refresh rate and adaptive sync. However, the M9 ships with a conventional desktop stand.

Connectivity: Standard Ports, Plus Bluetooth and Wi-Fi

Connectors include two HDMI 2.0 ports and a USB-C port that supports DisplayPort over USB Alternate Mode and delivers up to 65 watts of power. The monitor also has three USB-A 2.0 ports for connecting peripherals.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

While the HDMI and USB-C ports are downward-facing, the three USB-A ports face outward at the back for easy access.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The Movingstyle supports Wi-Fi for PC-free streaming of content and Bluetooth for connecting, say, to a game controller.

Smart TV Features: Streaming Galore

The Movingstyle can be used independently of a computer as a smart TV, a streaming platform, and a gaming hub. To this end, it runs the company's Tizen operating system and comes with a simple remote control.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

After using the remote to log in to my Samsung account, which I set up when I reviewed the M9, I could access the full range of free, ad-supported content on Samsung TV Plus. This includes several hundred channels featuring news, weather, sports, movies, and child-friendly content. The sheer volume of content seemed daunting at first, but with practice, navigating the menus became second nature.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The Tizen operating system, a Linux-based OS primarily developed by Samsung, has preinstalled apps for Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, Apple TV, Disney+, and the like—all services that require an account to use. I logged in with my Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video accounts and watched videos and parts of movies.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Notwithstanding the Movingstyle's 60Hz refresh rate and absence of adaptive sync, which limits its use to decidedly casual gaming, the display includes a solid set of gaming features. It integrates the Samsung Gaming Hub, so you can use it as a gaming platform on its own, independent of a PC or an attached gaming console. It also features Xbox Game Pass cloud streaming; you just need to supply the Bluetooth game controller. What's more, the Movingstyle supports Samsung's remote-activated Game Bar on-screen overlay, which can display input lag, FPS, HDR status, and variable refresh rate (VRR) information. It also adds a virtual aim point and a dynamic black equalizer.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

In addition to all its smart capabilities, the Movingstyle can still be used as a conventional computer monitor. You can do productivity work either with it connected to a computer via USB-C or HDMI, or from the built-in Workspace zone, which integrates Microsoft 365 apps and lets you connect remotely to a computer.

Performance: Good Contrast and sRGB Coverage, Weak HDR

Samsung lists the Movingstyle's minimum brightness as 240 nits (candelas per square meter) and its typical brightness as 300 nits; I measured it at 336 nits. Although the Movingstyle is capable of handling HDR content, it showed no particular aptitude for it; it lacks VESA DisplayHDR certification, and I measured its HDR peak brightness at 354 nits.

The Movingstyle uses a vertical alignment (VA) screen with a rated contrast ratio of 3,000:1. This is considerably better than most in-plane switching (IPS) and many IPS Black panels, though a far cry from the Samsung M9's near-infinite contrast ratio thanks to its OLED panel's ability to render true black tones by turning off blocks of pixels. The Movingstyle exceeded its rated contrast in my testing, delivering a 3,255:1 ratio.

Samsung rates the Movingstyle's color gamut coverage at 72% of the NTSC color space, a legacy standard for North American analog television. We don't test in the NTSC space, but we do test in Adobe RGB, a space with very similar color coverage geared to preparing photos and art for print production. In testing, it tallied 85% Adobe RGB color coverage, and 83% for DCI-P3, a color space designed for digital video. Both are well short of what we would expect from a monitor intended for content creation, but this isn't one. Better is its near-complete (98%) coverage of sRGB (see the chart below), the standard color space used for websites and web-based art.

(Credit: Portrait Displays)

In addition to the parts of movies, TV shows, and video clips I streamed through Samsung TV Plus and Disney+, I viewed images from our photo test suite and selected videos we use in monitor testing. Image quality was solid throughout. Although colors don't pop as they do on the Samsung M9's QD-OLED screen, their rendering is fine for casual streaming and photo viewing, and the Movingstyle does well in showing detail in dark areas. The sound system's volume is adequate for a small room, and sound quality is passable, though bass response is on the weak side.