Insignia F30 Series 2022 TV Review

Unfortunately, this TV has a fairly dated design, with thick plastic bezels and a glossy finish on the bezels that show dust and fingerprints easily. The feet are clunky and look cheap.

This TV isn't part of our 100 TV accelerated longevity test.

The feet are very basic, and they don't support the TV very well, as the TV wobbles forward and backward easily. There's no alternate position, and they're set at the ends of the TV, so you'll need a large table if you're not planning on wall-mounting the TV.

Footprint of the 65" stand: 53.1" x 11.8".

The feet lift the TV about 2.9" above the table, so most soundbars fit in front of it without blocking the screen.

The back is plain and looks cheap. Most of the inputs face to the side and are very easy to access when the TV is wall-mounted. There's no cable management.

The Insignia F30 Series has mediocre build quality. It's almost entirely made of cheap plastic, and the back panel and borders flex easily. The feet don't support the TV well, and combined with the cheap materials, it's a bit worrisome.

Unfortunately, the Insignia F30 has bad contrast. There's no local dimming feature to reduce the backlight around dark areas of the screen, so they appear blue and look washed-out.

Since this TV lacks a local dimming feature, there's no blooming around bright objects in otherwise dark scenes. Since the entire backlight is always on at the same intensity and it has a low contrast ratio, dark scenes still look washed out.

Blacks on this TV are raised significantly by the low contrast ratio, so there's almost no noticeable black crush. This means that fine details in shadows and darker areas of the screen are preserved and easy to make out.

This TV doesn't have a local dimming feature; the entire backlight is always on at the same intensity, so there's no distracting flicker or brightness changes as bright highlights move across the screen.

Switching to 'Game' mode doesn't result in any noticeable difference in dark scene performance.

Unfortunately, this TV has poor peak brightness in SDR. It's not bright enough to overcome glare in a bright room. On the other hand, there's no noticeable variation in brightness with different scenes.

These measurements are after calibration with the following settings:

• Picture Mode: Movie
• Backlight: 100
• Contrast: 70
• Gamma: 0
• Color Temperature: Warm

Unfortunately, this TV has disappointing HDR brightness. Most content looks good enough, but bright highlights and flashes of light don't stand out at all.

These measurements are after calibrating the HDR white point, with the following settings:

• HDR Picture Mode: Movie
• Backlight: 100
• Contrast: 90
• Color Temperature: Warm 1

There's a slight decrease in peak brightness when you switch to 'Game' mode, but it's not really noticeable. In 'Game' mode, the Contrast setting defaults to '85'. Increasing it back to '90' restores the brightness to what it was in 'Movie'.

These measurements with the following settings:

• HDR Picture Mode: Game
• Backlight: 100
• Contrast: 85
• Color Temperature: Warm 1

The Insignia F30 Series has good PQ EOTF tracking, so most content is displayed close to the luminance level intended by the creator. Very dark scenes are a bit too dark, and the TV starts tone mapping very early due to its low peak brightness, so even moderately-lit scenes are a bit too dim. There's a sharp cutoff at the TV's peak brightness, causing a loss of fine details in very bright scenes.

Gradients in HDR look excellent. There's some banding in dark shades of gray, but otherwise, there are no significant issues.

The Insignia F30 has an alright color gamut. Coverage of the DCI-P3 color space is good, so most HDR content is displayed well. Coverage of the wider Rec. 2020 color space isn't very good, though, so content mastered in that color space looks dull and more muted. It also has poor tone mapping in the Rec. 2020 color space, so saturated colors look off.

Unfortunately, the Insignia F30 has sub-par color volume. It's limited by its low peak brightness in general, and colors don't get very bright. It also can't display dark, saturated colors well due to its low contrast ratio.

The Insignia F30 has great accuracy in SDR before calibration. The white balance and overall color accuracy are great, but there are a few noticeable issues with all shades of blue. The color temperature is slightly cool, so there's a minor blue tint. Gamma is close to the 2.2 target chosen for a moderately-lit room.

Unfortunately, this TV doesn't feature a full color calibration system, and the white balance calibration is very limited. This makes it difficult to accurately calibrate it.

You can see our full calibration settings here.

This TV has good gray uniformity overall, but there are a few distracting issues. There are vertical bars that are mainly noticeable along the top and bottom edge, and the left and right sides of the screen are significantly darker than the center. There's just a bit of dirty screen effect in the center, though, which is great. Dark scenes look much better overall, though, and there are no noticeable issues.

Unfortunately, the Insignia F30 has mediocre black uniformity. The entire screen looks blue due to the low contrast ratio, and the backlight bleeds through a bit along the bottom edge. Sadly, there's no local dimming feature to improve uniformity.

Surprisingly for a budget TV, the Insignia F30 handles low-quality content well with the smoothing features enabled. There's very little macroblocking or pixelation, but some fine details are lost.

The Insignia F30 has a good viewing angle. It's a good choice for a wide seating arrangement as the image remains consistent when viewed from the sides. Colors hardly shift, but the image fades a bit at a moderate angle.

The Insignia F30 has decent reflection handling. The semi-gloss finish helps reduce the intensity of direct reflections a bit but adds a slight haze to the screen. Since it can't get very bright, glare is still distracting, so it's not suitable for a bright room.

This TV has an RGB subpixel layout, which is better for PC use than BGR panels because it improves the text clarity, which you can read about here.

Unfortunately, some 480p sources aren't scaled properly by this TV. It isn't an issue as long as you're using a fairly recent player, as most of them can upscale 480p sources to a higher resolution before sending it to the TV.

720p content, including most cable TV channels, is upscaled decently, but like the higher-end Insignia F50 QLED, it's a bit worse than most comparable models.

1080p content is displayed well and looks almost as good as native 4k content. It looks a bit sharper than most comparable models, but it's not bad.

4k content is displayed perfectly. There are no signs of subpixel issues like dithering.

This TV can't display 8k signals.

The Insignia F30 has a fair response time. There's very little overshoot, but most transitions are a bit slow, so there's more blur behind fast-moving objects.

Unfortunately, the Insignia F30 flickers at all backlight levels below max. There are two distinct flicker frequencies; the most significant flicker is at 220Hz, and there's a secondary intermittent flicker that sometimes occurs separately at 330Hz, as confirmed with an oscilloscope (220Hz, 330Hz). On the plus side, since this TV can't get very bright, it's probably best to leave the brightness at max anyway, and there's no flicker at max.

This TV doesn't have an optional backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion (BFI).

Unfortunately, unlike the step-up Insignia F50 QLED, this TV doesn't have a motion interpolation feature.

Thanks to the relatively slow response time, this TV has very little stutter when watching low frame rate content like movies and most TV shows. It's still noticeable in slow panning shots, but it's not too bad.

Unfortunately, this TV can't remove judder from any source.

Unfortunately, this TV is limited to a 60Hz fixed refresh rate. It doesn't support any variable refresh rate technologies.

The Insignia F30 has outstanding low input lag, resulting in a responsive gaming experience, and there's almost no variation in input lag with different resolutions. Unfortunately, the input lag in the 'PC' Picture Mode, which is normally needed for clear text with a chroma 4:4:4 signal from a PC, is high. Since this TV can't display 4:4:4 properly anyway, this mode is useless.

Unfortunately, this TV can't display chroma 4:4:4 signals properly. It results in some noticeable text artifacts when using it as a PC monitor, but it's not noticeable when gaming, either from a PC or a console.

Unfortunately, this TV can't take full advantage of the PS5. It's limited to a 60Hz fixed refresh rate, with no variable refresh rate support. It doesn't switch to game mode automatically, so for the lowest input lag, you'll need to manually switch to the 'Game' Picture Mode.

Unfortunately, this TV can't take full advantage of the Xbox Series S|X. It's limited to a 60Hz fixed refresh rate, with no variable refresh rate support. It doesn't switch to game mode automatically, so for the lowest input lag, you'll need to manually switch to the 'Game' Picture Mode.

Unlike most modern TVs, the Insignia F30 has a full-sized composite input, no adapter required, which is great if you have older devices, including some older game consoles.

This TV doesn't support any DTS formats, which is disappointing as DTS is often used as the main audio track on Blu-ray movies.

The Insignia F30 has a mediocre frequency response. It can't get very loud, and like most TVs, it has very little bass. There's no room correction feature, and there's quite a bit of compression at max volume. The sound profile in the mid-range and low-treble range is good, so dialogue sounds good at lower listening levels.

This TV has decent distortion performance. There's very little noticeable distortion in the vocal range, even at max volume, which is great.

The Insignia F30 runs Amazon's Fire TV smart interface. The interface is very smooth and easy to use, and it has a great selection of additional streaming apps.

Unfortunately, like almost every TV on the market, there are ads throughout the home interface and content store, and you can't disable them.

The app store has a great selection of additional apps to download, and you can also cast content from your mobile device.

The remote is identical to the one included with the Insignia F50 QLED. It's a pretty basic remote, but it has built-in voice control, which you can use to change inputs, launch apps, or search for content in specific apps, but you can't use it to adjust settings like the backlight.

There's a single button along the bottom bezel. You can use it to turn the TV on and off or switch inputs.

• Remote
• 2x AAA batteries
• Power cable
• User guides