This 85-inch TV costs less than an iPhone — should you actually buy it?
This 85-inch TV costs less than an iPhone — should you actually buy it?
Publish Date: 2026-06-16 10:19:00
Source Domain: tech.yahoo.com
I watched my first World Cup on a 27-inch tube TV in my college apartment. Standard definition. The kind of TV that weighed more than 60 pounds and needed two people just to get it up a flight of stairs. At the time, I thought it was plenty of screen for a game.
Fast-forward a few years (okay, decades), and I’m sitting down in front of an 85-inch Insignia F50 in my basement, the game playing in 4K, a picture so clear that I can read “Sverige” in the crest of the Swedish players’ jerseys clearly, all on a TV that cost less than a budget-friendly iPhone 17e.
If you’re looking for the largest screen for the least amount of money, the Insignia F50 series is it. At $550 — the seemingly permasale price at which this ostensibly $900 TV is often sold — this is not a television that’s going to make any videophile’s shortlist. It’s a 60Hz direct-lit LED panel with HDR10 — not HDR10+, not Dolby Vision — modest brightness, two tiny speakers and a Fire TV remote so small and generic that I’ve already lost it twice in the cushions of my sectional while writing this review. These are real limitations, and I’ll get to every one of them.
Amazon
Eighty-five inches for $550. That’s the whole pitch.
Insignia’s F50 doesn’t ask you to compromise on size to stay in budget. It just asks you to be honest about what you’re buying. This is a big-screen TV built for people who want to go large without the financing plan and at this price point, nothing else comes close to the real estate it delivers.
Pros
- Exceptional value for size
- Fire TV built in
- HDR10 support
- 4K/UHD resolution
Cons
- Fire TV software lags, crashes
- Not particularly bright
- Audio quality is lackluster
- Only 3 HDMI 2.0 ports
But here’s something a spec sheet won’t tell you that I will: screen size matters more than almost anything else. 85 inches of any screen is a radically different viewing experience than 65. The TV I replaced to test this one was a 65-inch entry-level LED — a perfectly respectable television by any measure —…
