Comment by simoncion

For what it's worth, I have a monitor with VA panel that has no local dimming. It has a maximum brightness of a bit shy of 380 nits, and a real contrast ratio of ~3000:1, so HDR stuff ends up looking fine in dim rooms.

I would much rather have this monitor than one the "zoned" backlights that I've seen. They inevitably put nasty, nasty halos around medium-to-high-contrast parts of the picture. IME, any local dimming scheme that's less fine-grained than per-pixel dimming is simply not good enough.