Diode lasers may vie with LEDs for lighting supremacy
It’s not just BMW with laser headlights. But the higher efficiency is tempting.
Little research had been done on diode lasers for lighting because of a widespread assumption that human eyes would find laser-based white light unpleasant. It would comprise four extremely narrow-band wavelengths—blue, red, green, and yellow—and would be very different from sunlight, for example, which blends a wide spectrum of wavelengths with no gaps in between. Diode laser light is also ten times narrower than that emitted by LEDs
Hmm. While I believe the result with broad absorbers (like fruit), some pigments are pretty narrow-lined, especially those with intensely saturated color. If the peak of such a narrow-lined pigment falls between two of the laser lines, I’d imagine that there could be some rather… interesting effects on color.
The idea of using a blue GaN to pump a broad-emitting phosphor, like the Ce:YAG used in current “white light” diodes, seems much more plausible to me for room lighting. For projection, however, I wouldn’t be shocked at all if lasers are the way to go. Heck, most compact projectors already use ~440 nm GaN diodes for their blue.