A video display system based on constructing images through displaying orthogonal basis function components of the image is disclosed. The system is comprised of two display components aligned and driven concurrently. The first display component is a coarse pixel array. The second display component is a spatial light modulator whose geometric details are finer than the first pixel array. The overall system reconstructs the intended video to be displayed at the finer geometric details of the second display component at a minimal image quality loss through the use of time-domain display of orthogonal image basis function components. The resultant system has a considerably reduced interconnection complexity and number of active circuit elements, and also requires a considerably smaller video data rate if a lossy image reconstruction scheme is used. An embodiment with a LED based display and an LCD based spatial light modulator utilizing the concepts, and methods to drive the displays are described herein.