The Insignia F30 Series 2022 is a very simple, entry-level 4k TV released in 2022. It sits below the Insignia F50 QLED and offers very limited picture quality and almost no picture processing options. It's available in a 65-inch and 70-inch size, so there's very little to choose from if you need something smaller. It runs the Fire TV smart interface, which is very easy to use and has a great selection of streaming apps, so you can easily find your favorite content.
The Insignia F30 is just alright. It doesn't look very good in a dark room for watching movies, as it has a very low contrast ratio. It has a wide viewing angle and good smart features, so it's best for watching TV shows or sports in a moderately-lit room, as it can't get bright enough to overcome glare. It's decent for gaming thanks to its low input lag, but it's limited by its slow response time and lack of gaming features.
The Insignia F30 is just okay for watching movies in a dark room. It has a very low contrast ratio, mediocre black uniformity, and no local dimming feature, so dark scenes look terrible. 1080p and 4k content is displayed well, but it doesn't upscale 480p content well, so it's not as good for watching older movies on DVD. It can't remove judder from any source, so movies aren't played back smoothly.
The Insignia F30 is a decent TV for watching shows in a bright room. It has decent reflection handling but poor peak brightness, so it can't overcome glare if you're in a bright room. It has a good viewing angle, so you can walk around the room with the TV on and enjoy a consistent image. The Fire TV interface has a great selection of streaming apps, so you can easily find your favorite shows.
The Insignia F30 is just alright for watching sports in a bright room. It has a good viewing angle, so it's an okay choice for a wide seating arrangement as the image remains consistent when viewed from the sides, so you don't have to fight over the best seat. On the other hand, it has low peak brightness and just decent reflection handling, so it struggles to overcome glare even in a moderately-lit room.
The Insignia F30 is a decent TV for playing games. It has fantastic low input lag when gaming, ensuring a responsive gaming experience with little delay between your actions and what you see on screen. On the other hand, it's limited to a 60Hz refresh rate and doesn't support any advanced gaming features like variable refresh rates. It also has a slow response time, so there's more blur behind fast-moving objects.
The Insignia F30 is just okay for watching movies in HDR in a dark room. It has a very low contrast ratio, mediocre black uniformity, and no local dimming feature, so dark scenes look terrible. It can't get very bright in HDR, so bright highlights don't stand out very well, and it can't display a wide color gamut, so HDR content looks dull and muted overall. On the other hand, it has excellent gradient handling in HDR, so there's very little banding.
The Insignia F30 is a decent TV for gaming in HDR, but mainly due to its gaming performance, as HDR adds very little. It has low input lag for a responsive gaming experience, but it's limited to a 60Hz refresh rate and doesn't support any advanced gaming features like a variable refresh rate. HDR adds very little, as it can't display a wide color gamut, it can't get very bright, and it has a bad contrast ratio.
Unfortunately, the Insignia F30 is unsuitable for use as a desktop PC monitor. It's decent for gaming, even from a PC, but it can't display chroma 4:4:4 signals properly, so text isn't clear when you're on the desktop. It also has abnormally high input lag when you switch the input label to 'PC'. On the other hand, it has a wide viewing angle, so the sides of the screen remain uniform when you're sitting up close.
We bought and tested the 65-inch Insignia F30 Series 2022. It's also available in a 70-inch format, which most likely uses a different panel type and has much better contrast and better black uniformity, but a worse viewing angle.
Size | Model Number | Panel Type |
---|---|---|
65" | NS-65F301NA23 | IPS |
70" | NS-70F301NA23 | VA |
The unit we bought and tested was manufactured in September 2022. You can see the label for it here.
The Insignia F30 Series 2022 is a very basic TV with limited picture quality and few extra features. It's an okay choice if you're looking for a large TV with good smart features on a budget, but if you're willing to spend a bit more, you can get much better picture quality from TVs like the Hisense U6H or the TCL 4 Series/S445 2022.
See our recommendations for the best smart TVs, the best TVs under $1,500, and the best 4k TVs.
The Insignia F50 QLED is much better than the Insignia F30 Series 2022. The F50 looks much better in both bright and dark rooms. The F50 gets significantly brighter, so it can handle more glare, and it has a much higher contrast ratio, so blacks look deeper. The F50 also has a much wider color gamut, so HDR content looks more vivid and lifelike. Finally, the F50 is better for gaming thanks to its much faster response time, with less blur behind fast-moving objects.
The differences are minor, but overall, the TCL 4 Series/S446 2021 is a bit better than the Insignia F30 Series 2022. The TCL gets significantly brighter and it has slightly better reflection handling, so it can overcome more glare in a bright room. The TCL also has a faster response time for clearer motion when gaming, and it's better for use as a PC monitor as it can display chroma 4:4:4 properly, which is essential for clear text from a PC.
The Toshiba C350 Fire TV 2021 and the Insignia F30 Series 2022 offer nearly identical picture quality and features. The Toshiba is slightly better overall, as the Insignia flickers at a low frequency with any brightness setting below max.
The Amazon Fire TV 4-Series is much better than the Insignia F30 Series 2022. The Amazon TV is significantly better for watching movies in a dark room thanks to its higher contrast ratio, and it can remove judder from any source. The Amazon TV gets brighter, so it can handle more glare in a bright room.
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.
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.
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:
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.