A high efficiency lighting system (100) is described that has a small etendue. This can be used, for example, for backlighting a display device such as a liquid crystal display (LCD), projection displays, as well as for general lighting purposes. A portion of the light from a light emitting device die (101) falls onto a fluorescent material (105,106), such as phosphor. Dichroic mirrors (107,109) prevent the light generated by the fluorescent material to return to the light-emitting device. The mirrors may also provide collimation of the generated light and the remainder of the light from the light-emitting device. In this way a high efficiency system is realized because little or no generated light is absorbed and the generated light does not have to travel through a fluorescent material layer and thus has a high chance to go in the desired direction.