VA screens have terrible black smearing though. I also bought an OLED display and returned it because it was just very dim. I own a miniled display that peaks at 1000cd full screen (it has a fan to handle the heat) and I'm still looking for an OLED replacement.
It depends on the monitor and the colors involved in the transition. My VA monitor (a BenQ EW3270U) has limited-but-noticeable smearing between certain dark colors. Blacks and dark colors against mid-brightness and brighter are just fine. [0] It's my understanding that this monitor has quite-a-bit-less-bad color smearing than most VA panels, and has roughly the same -er- amount of slow transitions (just with a different set of colors) as my Asus PA246 IPS monitor.
I play a variety of video games, so I see both muddily-dark and high-contrast areas. I'm fairly pleased with the performance of the panel they dropped into this monitor. Honestly, the off-axis color and contrast shifting is way more noticeable than the color smearing... and folks who sit down in front of this monitor don't tend to notice those shifts.
(Plus, if you play 3D video games released within the last five years, crap like temporal-anti-aliasing and its bastard children add so much smearing and rendering artifacts that it becomes quite challenging to determine what visual artifacts are actual pixels commanded to be on the screen by the renderer, and what might from too-slow flipping of the pixels in the screen. Is this a good state of affairs? Definitely not. But it's the one we find ourselves in.)
[0] It's entirely unlike the OLED screen in the Nexus 5a which has incredible smearing between black and a huge array of dark-to-medium-brightness colors. This smearing reduces as you increase the brightness of the screen, but doesn't go away entirely until you get to like the top quarter of the screen's brightness. (If you have one of these phones, drop your screen brightness to the bottom quarter and browse through back issues of the Gunnerkrigg Court webcomic. There are PLENTY of black-on-X color combinations to get a really obvious demonstration of the problem.)
> Still, I get your point - there's compromises in all technologies...
That's not my point. My point is that there are well-made devices that are substantially better than average, and poorly-made devices that are substantially worse than average.
People seem to think that OLED automatically means instant switching times and no color smearing... well, that all depends on how the panel is made and driven.
> The Nexus 5 is 12 years old...
Ah, crap. I meant to say "Pixel 5a". I do that all the damn time. I do wish they'd never changed the name.
> I'd suggest comparing technologies applied in monitors that aren't teenagers.
Fun fact #1: The Pixel 5a was released three years ago.
Fun fact #2: The OLED version of the Nexus S (now fifteen years old) had no smearing. It was a beautiful display. Its only problem was that it burned in the top status bar within a year or so of use.
Tech improvement isn't a ratchet. (If it were, we'd not have had that it-sure-as-hell-seemed-like-five year period where pretty much the only LCD screens you could get were "high definition" 1080p TN displays!)
