Very good question for Blur Busters knowledge of strobe backlights;
Let me address this in two parts:
(1) The backlight versus the edgelight issue.
After my
Arduino scanning backlight experiments, I found out that edgelights were vastly easier and more efficient than backlights. Backlights are extremely difficult to make uniform, without lens or parabolic mirrors.
(From
a section in my "Creating Strobe Backlight" document)
Then I consequently discovered LightBoost, an off-the-market solution that was much more easily hacked/modded (there are now 5 different ways to enable LightBoost!). The rest was history. Although a lot of us call it "backlight strobing", it's really become "edgelight strobing" nowadays, because of the way most LCD's are manufactured.
(2) Making strobing brighter
With edgelights, you can use lower lumens to get a brighter illumination.
Moderate voltage boosts can be safe: The easiest way is to simply us voltage boost. An example is CREE's
Pulsed Over-Current Driving of XLamp LEDs. You can typically briefly use a higher voltage pulse to make LED's about 3x brighter, provided the illumination is brief. That's very convenient for strobe backlights/edgelights, since each flash is brief, anyway.
Modifying LightBoost for brighter flashes: One Blur Busters reader actually modified a BENQ XL2411T for a brighter LightBoost=10% by adjusting a voltage-boost component -- see
Modifying a LightBoost Monitor for brighter strobes (part of the same "Creating A Strobe Backlight" document).
There are brighter options now on market: Right now, the brightest strobe backlight out-of-the-box is Eizo Turbo240, found in the
Eizo FG2421. It manages to achieve 250cd/m2 average during strobe mode, which is almost too bright for my eyes. It is probably already using a boost voltage (similiar to the above).
Edgelights can be modded with bigger LEDs: Another possibility for a monitor hacker is to remove a monitors' existing edgelight, and add a prism/mirror that focuses a powerful light source (bigger heatsinked LED's in a line) directly into the opening of the original edgelight, at the edge of an LCD. This would enable exactly what you are describing.
Shorter strobes requires brighter strobes to maintain average brightness. This is a big challenge of strobe backlights. CRT phosphor shine insanely bright (thousands of cd/m2) briefly to compensate for the short duration of their flicker. Eventually I'd like to see sub-millisecond-league strobing (e.g. 0.5ms strobe edgelight with capability for average 300cd/m2), since
I can easily tell apart 1.4ms from 2.4ms for LightBoost=10% versus LightBoost=100%. Mathematically 1 millisecond of strobe duration equals 1 pixel of extra motion blurring during 1000 pixels/second motion (assuming framerate=stroberate, and for simple squarewave ON-OFF strobe). Video game motion are often very high framerate, very clear graphics, and often faster than 1000 pixels/second, and fast GPU's allow framerate=stroberate. Here, the 1ms differences in strobe-flash-durations becomes easy to see in tests such as
TestUFO Panning Map Test especially at 1440 pixels/second or 1920 pixels/second.
P.S. Though it belongs here too, I've added a redirect to Area51, since this is in the "display hacking" universe too!