I've taken pictures of a beautiful scene only to discover later that a great part of its beauty lay in the contrasts not of color but of light. The human eye is amazingly dynamic, able to flick from one part of the view to another with 10 times the light in a fraction of a second. Unfortunately the developed picture can only use reflected light, and you do not get the same dynamic range of intensities that we see every day.

But suppose a picture were displayed not by reflected but by transmitted light. Imagine a picture (a slide) illuminated from behind by light that is not uniform. It would not be terribly hard to hand make masks for a particular slide using filters and a very bright light source. It seems quite hard to do this automatically. Even digital images, which use the CRT to generate different light intensities, have a certain flatness. Can we make a CRT (or LED-based system) with a greater range of brilliancy, and will the intrinsic coarseness of resolution for the light source interfere with the fine resolution of the picture itself?