The motion of the EG9600 never bothered me, but this is coming from someone who has mostly used LED TVs without any kind of motion compensation in the past. The first thing I did was turning off TruMotion. For all HDMI ports.
I checked my EC9700, the band is there, but only half the size of yours. there is an additional small bands on the right side. Oh, I just remembered I had post a 5% pic a while ago.
see here. there is absolutely no change of the darker sides or the banding since then, whoever states those things will get better with time best to post some before and after pics to prove it, otherwise, I'd say it is just your imagination.
Thank you. I actually checked a couple of early pages of the EC9700 thread to see if you had posted anything like that, but couldn't find it anymore. Funny thing is that it was actually me that had requested those pics from you in the past. Simply forgot about it.
As you have probably seen, the new british 65EC9700 owner over at avforums also posted pics of 5/10% and those seem to look okay.
Sorry to see you waiting this set for so long only to return it. No sure a replacement is worth it or not, I think most likely you will get a different pattern of banding. However, I have to say the I am not bothered by the banding like the others, barely notice them with real content even if I look really hard. The darker sides are quite annoying at times though, like watching through a binocular as some members in the UK forum stated.
The banding annoyed me more, but who knows how much the dark edges would get on my nerves if the banding wasn't there.
I was gonna go to BB after work to look at the 55" EG9600 when I saw this thread and no one responded. I wanted to get one this weekend for the fight. Now I'm thankful I didn't. Why does his PQ look so terrible for the fight ? I watched it on my parents' F8500 plasma and it looked way better than this ! What happened here in this photo ? So confused. Am I buying an Oled? Am I not ?
The only purpose of that blurry photo taken with an iPhone 6 was to show the obvious difference in black performance between the EG9600 4K OLED on the left and my old Sony Full HD LED TV on the right. Nothing more. Watching that Klitschko fight on the 4K OLED was a joy.
For somebody like myself who likes to watch a lot of boxing, the photo on the right is what my Oled would look like ? The LED on the left looks way better. There's no way to fix that ? Yapped couldn't , so he returned it. I would be spending too much money for my set to look like that when I want to watch a boxing match. Can any professional calibrators comment on this ?
LOL, really surprised how anyone could seriously think that the right TV is the OLED.

I returned the TV due to the near black issues, mainly the banding. But you couldn't see those when watching the fight. Basically no gray/near blacks where those could have shown up.So I'll say it again: this photo is good for showing the impressive blacks of the OLED in comparison to a LED TV (with VA panel, but no Local Dimming function), nothing else.
I consider a photo useful if it succesfully captures and shows what the person taking it wants us to see.
I have been tracking the 4k oled forum here and in UK very closely. there are few advanced/senior members have returned their sets. I honestly don't think they are LG haters. they were posting very positive comments and pictures at the beginning, they returned and replaced the sets later simply because there are issues that they don't want to live with, I don't totally agree with them, but calling them lg or oled hater, trashing oled? I think you are going to the other extreme.
That hater claim is soo stupid.