A novel light source for a 3D display system includes a plurality of left eye light emitters and a plurality of right eye light emitters. The left eye emitters include a broad spectral distribution emitter and an overlapping narrow spectral distribution emitter in each of the blue, green, and red color bands. Similarly, the right eye emitters include a broad spectral distribution emitter and an overlapping narrow spectral distribution emitter in each of the blue, green, and red color bands. The combined spectral distributions of each of the broad and narrow emitters provide a primary light for each color and for each eye that has a desirable spectral shape, including wide bandwidth and short tail(s). The invention thus minimizes cross-talk and speckling in left- and right-eye images of 3D display systems.