Brightly lit scenes are fine, but a romantically lit restaurant easily becomes a dark murky mess and dark night scenes have no contrast at all – unless there is little visual information in the frame, the encoding in use doesn’t perform particularly well at all. Worse still, it would appear that the encoding in use isn’t content adaptive, so it tars every scene with the same brush – adjust your image settings for one piece of content and it’s completely wrong for the next thing.

• Expect your viewing to be completely washed out in one scene, or over-saturated to the next.
• Expect skin tones to look ok in some content, but orange / brown / green in others.

And before Vodafone anyone complains that it’s my internet connection, or the box hasn’t had time to adapt to the stream yet – all testing is done via Gigabit Ethernet and a Gigabit Fibre connection at various times of day. There is no problem with 4K content over the same cabling, and the ‘visual’ pop-in of the stream buffering / loading takes a few seconds to stabilize (usually after the first ‘pop’ but occasionally there’s an intermediate step in between ‘low’ and ‘full quality’).

Basically, If Vodafone were to increase the transcoding bitrate and allow for a ‘pass-through’ resolution to allow external hardware to do proper upscaling, that would resolve these issues entirely.

Sky doesn’t get off entirely here either though, side-by-side the imagery from Sky tends to ghost with motion (combing is sometimes prevalent on text, but not as common). However it does look spectacular on relatively still scenes (or at least, as spectacular as you can get without buying Blu-ray / UHD versions of the same content).

In any case, after spending half an hour on the Vodafone, returning to the Sky decoder is always a significant visual upgrade.