Abstract: Techniques are provided to provide various pulse width modulation (PWM) schemes to embodiments of dual modulator display systems that may comprise a backlight of individually addressable and controllable light emitters. The backlight provides illumination to a light modulator for further conditioning of the light to be presented to a viewer. The backlight may be striped and each stripe is assigned a PWM scheme that effectively increases the bit depth of the controller for each stripe. The display system may allow a better matching of PWM periods to LCD frame rates to reduce visual artifacts. In another embodiment, the display system may detect a small bright feature to be rendered in the image data and, with a pre-assignment of light emitters to different partitions, the backlight controller may drive a subset of the light emitters according to the partitions.