Samsung Bespoke AI 4-Door French Door RF90F29AECRAA

Design and Features

• French Door design
• Clever beverage center
• Auto Open Door

The French Door style fridge freezer type is growing in popularity, and for good reason. Splitting the cold space so that the fridge runs across the entire width makes a lot of sense. For starters, you can fit in larger items, such as big cakes or a large turkey. Secondly, the items you’re likely to use most are all at the top, reachable without bending down.

The Samsung Bespoke AI 4-Door French Door RF90F29AECRAA makes the most of this design with some clever touches, including auto-open doors. Tap the sensors on the outside, and the chosen door will swing open. If you’ve ever approached a fridge with your hands full, you’ll love this feature.

With the doors open, the 16.5 cu. ft. fridge is accessible. There’s a single large shelf running across the top. Below are two smaller shelves, with a choice of positions, so you can rearrange the space to fit in the items that you want. At the bottom are two cold drawers for vegetables and fruits.

Large door pockets are available on both sides, able to hold big items, even large milk containers, as well as condiments and drinks. Only the bottom door pocket on the left-hand-side is slightly obstructed by the water jug for the integrated beverage center.

As this fridge is plumbed into your water supply, the water it provides is filtered. Here, the space between the two drawers has been used for a water filter holder. It’s a clever design, as you don’t have to pull the fridge out to get to the filter, as you do with most models.

Accessing the beverage center is via a small door on the outside. Open this up and there’s a standard water dispenser, plus the aforementioned pitcher. The pitcher has an infuser in it, so you can have flavoured, filtered water ready to go.

As the beverage center is located inside the fridge, there’s no ice dispensing here. Instead, ice is made automatically and dispensed into a bottom drawer in both cubed ice and smaller ice bites, so you’re covered whether you want a cold glass of water or you’re hosting a cocktail party.

Otherwise, this bottom freezer drawer has space for up to 9 cu. ft. of frozen food, neatly spread between two drawers and three compartments (plus the ice storage).

Above this is the 3.1 cu. f.t FlexZone drawer, which has a variable temperature setting, so you can store fruits and vegetables to meat and seafood. It’s nice to have this level of customisation to use the space as you want.

As this is a smart fridge, the Samsung Bespoke AI 4-Door French Door RF90F29AECRAA has Family Hub built in via the large touchscreen panel on the front. This can act as a shared calendar for the family, with neat features, such as digital notes. It can also run apps, including Ring, Spotify and YouTube.

Family Hub isn’t for everyone, but if you want something bold at the heart of your kitchen (and your family), it works really well and you don’t need to devote wall space to an alternative device.

The screen is responsive, although for those purely used to the displays on phones or iPads, it does require an extra strong prod to get anything to respond. It can be a little slow to navigate at times, although for what it’s for, I think the addition is more of a benefit than a detraction.

Inside the fridge is a camera that powers AI Vision Inside. This is designed to recognise “37 unobscured fresh food items, such as select fruits and vegetables”. Other foods can be labelled as they’re put in. The idea is that the fridge tracks what’s inside it and warns you about things that are about to expire.

It’s not a particularly good system. I had trouble getting it to recognise foods, and it’s slow. Each item has to be held up, you have to wait for the beep and then place the item inside the fridge; you can’t put items in door pockets, otherwise AI Vision Inside thinks the item has been removed.

Overall, this system is too laborious for day-to-day use, but it might be useful if you’ve bought a one-off item that you rarely use and want a warning when it might expire, such as some preserved lemons for a tagine.

Of course, the Samsung Bespoke AI 4-Door French Door RF90F29AECRAA connects to SmartThings. That’s handy, as it sends warnings if there are issues, such as a door left open. And, you can use the energy saving mode to reduce running costs.

Performance

• Minimal temperature fluctuations
• Freezer can run a little colder than required
• Not cheap to run, but you pay for a lot of features

To see how well the Samsung Bespoke AI 4-Door French Door RF90F29AECRAA works, I loaded it up with ice packs to simulate food, and set the fridge to 40°F and the Freezer to 0°C. I then used temperature sensors spread throughout the fridge to measure temperatures.

In the fridge, the average temperature was 42°F, which is just 2°F warmer than the target. I found that temperatures fluctuated only slightly, too, with stability good for food longevity.

In the freezer section, I found that the Samsung Bespoke AI 4-Door French Door RF90F29AECRAA ran quite cold at -8°F, which is a 8°F colder than the target. I’ve noticed that Samsung models can run a bit colder than expected.

With all of the smart tech and screen, this isn’t the cheapest fridge freezer to run. Monitoring power, I estimated a yearly running cost of $115. That’s $3.97 per cu. ft. per year of space, which is quite a bit more than the Samsung RF29DB9900QD costs to run. However, you do have to take into account how much useful tech is at play here.

Should you buy it?