Vizio M322i-B1

Design
Vizio's M322i HDTV has a thin, quarter-inch black plastic bezel surrounded by a silver-gray plastic band. Apart from the small silver-gray plastic tag with the Vizio logo protruding from the bottom right, the M322i's front is featureless.

View all 7 photos in gallery

Round the back, you'll find an HDMI port, a USB port, an analog audio output, and an optical port facing left, and two additional HDMI ports, shared component and composite inputs, stereo audio outputs, an antenna connector, and an Ethernet port facing down. At the back of the screen, towards the bottom left, is a button that handles both Power and Input selection functions, and the remote takes care of the HDTV's other controls.
The 7-inch remote is double-sided, with its top surface is comprised mostly of a glossy black plastic with a gray-silver band surrounding its edges, much like the HDTV's bezels design. A large, square navigation pad occupies part of the remote's top half, and you'll find playback buttons above it and Volume/Channel Up/Down and VIA Plus buttons below it. The buttons aren't backlit, but at least Vizio hasn't crowded the remote with rarely used buttons, and they feel distinct enough to easily identify them without looking.

The other side of the remote holds a useful, backlit QWERTY keyboard that makes inputting login credentials and searching media, such as YouTube videos, much easier than using the remote's navigation pad to select each letter on an on-screen keyboard. It uses a separate, side-facing infrared emitter to send keyboard commands. You just need to be careful not to cover it with your fingers when entering text with your thumbs.
Features
The M332i can connect to the Internet over Wi-Fi or Ethernet and offers the Vizio Internet Apps Plus (VIA Plus) ecosystem. VIA Plus offers access to several streaming media services and online apps, including Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, Hulu Plus, YouTube, several Yahoo widgets, Facebook, Twitter, and iHeart Radio. A large, central button with Vizio's "V" logo on the remote brings up the VIA Plus menu, and dedicated service buttons for Amazon, Netflix, and iHeart Radio sit near the top of the remote.
Vizio claims the M322i features second-screen functionality, which allows you to control some apps, like Netflix, through your mobile devices. However, there's little, if any, guidance on how to enable this second screen functionality, and we couldn't get this feature to work with Android or iOS devices in our tests.
See How We Test HDTVs
PerformanceWe test HDTVs with a Klein K-10A colorimeter, SpectraCal's CalMAN 5 software, and DisplayMate test patterns. After basic dark room calibration, we determined that the best settings for the purposes of our testing was Calibrated picture mode, Brightness at 48, Contrast at 52, and Normal Color Temperature. Unfortunately, whether we used these settings or not, the M322i didn't perform very well. It showed an impressive peak brightness of 299.78 cd/m2, but that was tempered by an abysmal 0.19 cd/m2 black level in a contrast tunnel test pattern for a disappointing 1,578:1 contrast ratio. Even for a budget HDTV, this is a poor showing. In comparison, the TCL 40FS4610R$349.00 at Amazon displayed a less-than-half as bright black level of 0.08 cd/m2 and over double the contrast ratio at 3,270:1, and the Sharp 48LE551U$447.99 at Dell displayed an even lower 0.07 cd/m2 black level and a 2,850:1 contrast ratio.
The M322i has adaptive backlighting that can brighten and dim certain zones behind the screen to reflect the scene. However, this model has only five zones, which means lighting adjustments affect large bands across the display. The screen also adjusts pixel coloration based on the zone lighting, but it doesn't help the significant bloom that can appear in dark scenes with only a few objects are well lit. The larger versions of Vizio's M-series HDTVs have significantly more backlight zones, which should potentially reduce the problem in those models. However, the larger screen sizes have not been tested in the lab. You can disable the backlight adjustments to reduce bloom, but this further hurts the already poor black levels.

The above chart shows measured color levels as dots and ideal color levels as boxes. The M322i has very good red and black levels in Calibrated mode, but green skews a bit warm and undersaturated. White is nearly perfect, and the overall picture in this mode is vibrant and solid, but out of the box its greens are sadly a bit weak. Fortunately, the M322i offers advanced color calibration settings if you want to make granular adjustments, but this isn't something we recommend for most users.
Input lag is the amount of time a screen takes between receiving a signal and changing the display to reflect that signal. The M322i showed a lag of 27.9 milliseconds in Calibrated mode and 26.2 milliseconds in Game mode, both very good showings for an HDTV. Dedicated (and more expensive, and generally smaller) gaming monitors can cut that number well in half, but even so, the lag shouldn't be an issue to most gamers. It's primarily of note for extremely competitive players in certain genres, and anyone without their eyes on professionally competing in e-sports will be fine with the screen.
We watched The Amazing Spider-Man and The Big Lebowski on the M322i, and both looked perfectly acceptable for a budget screen, but neither were exactly impressive. The alley scenes in The Amazing Spider-Man looked washed out with the poor black level and contrast ratio, and while shadow details could be easily made out, the shadows themselves simply weren't as dark as they should have been. Brightly lit scenes looked better, but also occasionally looked slightly faded, with some highlight details on bright objects lost.
The accurate reds and blues made Spider-Man's costume look accurate, if not particularly vivid. However, the slightly skewed greens meant flesh tones and backgrounds in darker scenes tended to appear cool and at times pallid. The Big Lebowski fared better, with the harsh lighting of the bowling alley still managing to look consistently warm and flesh tones appearing generally well balanced.
Power
Under normal viewing conditions, the M322i consumes 45 watts in Calibrated mode, and 34 watts in the power-saving Standard mode. Standard mode skews the colors significantly and looks roundly terrible compared with Calibrated mode, and that 11 watts you'll save isn't worth the eyestrain.
Online features are nice, but they can't make up for a poor display. While the Vizio M322i-B1 handles colors reasonably well, its black levels and contrast ratio are abysmal, and its few LED zones can lead to significant light bloom. For just $30 more, you can pick up the larger and far better-looking TCL 40FS4610R Roku TV, which stands as our Editors' Choice for budget screens.