I don’t mean BETTER. That’s a different conversation. I mean cooler.
An old CRT display was literally a small scale particle accelerator, firing angry electron beams at light speed towards the viewers, bent by an electromagnet that alternates at an ultra high frequency, stopped by a rounded rectangle of glowing phosphors.
If a CRT goes bad it can actually make people sick.
That’s just. Conceptually a lot COOLER than a modern LED panel, which really is just a bajillion very tiny lightbulbs.
Considering LEDs are so good at producing a very tight wavelength, I wonder if this could be replicated with more energy efficient lamps.
Or if non visible spectrum lights can be used to make similar alpha channel masks that don’t affect lighting the scene.
A laser, maybe, but definitely not LEDs. Vapor/gas lamps produce the narrowest frequency bands possible, because it comes from very well defined atomic transitions (Hz range). LEDs produce frequency bands with widths in the GHz/THz range, while semiconductor lasers can maybe reach KHz if they are really good. So, unfortunately, for this type of applications, vapor lamps would probably still be needed.
Source: I work with lasers and spectroscopy.
Edit: very good idea about using non-visible light!
Is there some filter that you could put up over the LEDs that would block everything but a very narrow frequency of light?
Well, one possibility is using something known as Fabry-Perot filter. It allows an extremely narrow frequency to pass, due to multiple reflections and interferences inside the material. Put the light source material within this filter, and you get a laser. That’s essentially the main difference between a led and a semiconductor laser. The filter makes only a narrow band of the emission be “stuck” there, creating a feedback effect that eventually tends to infinity, and a good chunk of that power passes through the filter reflectors, which are intentionally not perfect.
Other than that, I don’t think there is a filter that could be as narrow as the line emission from vapor lamps. Maybe using metamaterials, but a laser would be so much cheaper and easier. A vapor laser would certainly get the job done, but they are large and hard to maintain.