Another quick look showed some shadow detail crushing a little, even though the scene in general looked pretty good. It seems to exhibit wildy varying gamma and can look okay or great in one scene and a disaster in another...
I surely agree with what you report but (imho) this is a little price to pay to have decent contrast.
I calibrated some OLED TV and I come from a Sony X9 4K Tv ....In my personal Home Cinema I have a JVC X500 + Black Diamond and .... This AX900 reproduce a good contrast only if you use FALD in the highest position in presets "Normal" or "Custom".
I'm not talkin' about the WOW effect when the Display totally turn OFF the light ...I'm talkn' about the contrast sensation when you're lookin' a mid APL scene of a film.
I'm abituated to high contrast values and for me this pannel give sufficient viewing contrast only if FALD is at max position in the only two presets where FALD totally tun off the panel (normal and custom).
I'm disgusting by the contrast If I whatch a letterbox film with FALD at mid level ... black bars are accettable only with FALD at High for me.
This is a priority for my taste.
After this personal opinion ... I found another bug.
Look at this picture (sorry for the very low quality):
You can easly see two orizontal bands.
This is not a fisical DSE problem on my panel ... Those bands are caused by the FALD system!
The orizontal bands vanish if FALD is turned off or in low position.
Those bands are evident only with letterboxed films.
It seems like FALD goes wrong near the black bars....
There is no problem if you see a full-frame film.
Those orizontal bars become much more evident if FALD is set to max, much much less evident with FALD set to mid.
This is evidently a BUG because there is no logical reason to dim zones in the lighten portion of the image (like in the example of posted image)!
If you look the image near the letterbox-black-bars light is OK but moving to the centre of the image the orizontal zones have an illogical dimmed light.
I hope that this can be fixed soon by Panasonic with a firmware update.... about this: do you have some link or email to report this bug directly to panasonic?
Many thanks.