looking for low-power, low-light, long-life, warm-tone LED lamp or bulb.
November 14, 2014 5:54 PM   Subscribe

I am looking for a reading lamp which closely imitates the light of a single candle.

The specs would be a color temperature of 1850k and 13-15 lumens. Lumens can scale up somewhat but the typical light output of three-LED headband flashlights is way too intense.

Headmount or book-mount is fine. Something like the old incandescent itty-bitty book lamp is sorta in the neighborhood but I prefer a mount point over my shoulder or on my head so that I don't accidentally drag my eyes over the light source. All the extant clones of the itty-bitty that use LEDs that I am aware of use brighter LEDS than I want and have a color temp closer to 5000k. Seems likely someone would have seen a product differentiation strategy here but my google-fu is weak on this.

Thought I'd drop a line here. Any leads?
posted by mwhybark to Technology (3 answers total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
 
How about combining a single-LED USB light like this, with some tissue paper like this, stacked and crumpled up in shapes like these, smashed over and stuck to the light?

The tissue paper would let you colorize and diffuse the light.

You could even buy a big honking USB battery to run the light off of, as a base, instead of plugging it into a laptop.

That's exactly what I'd do, though I'd do it with this guy here. Cuz if it all fails, at least I'd still be left with some cat toys, 98 sheets of tissue paper for potential more cat toys, a spare battery, and a pretty cool astronaut light.
posted by herrdoktor at 6:06 PM on November 14, 2014 [1 favorite]


You could do a bulb from:

https://www.lowbluelights.com/index.asp

I used to use candles at night, and I finally switched to a low-wattage bulb from these guys. It's brighter than a candle, of course, but I get the same effect. You could poke around for something that works for you--I see some LED stuff.
posted by zeek321 at 6:18 PM on November 14, 2014 [1 favorite]


The less woo-y version of "low-blue" is called "warm white." Link is to individual component LEDs from superbrightleds.com -- I've bought from them before for several applications. They used to have even warmer LEDs that were warm-white LEDs coated in some sort of phosphor that emitted warm light when energized by the LED, but they don't seem to sell them anymore. You'll need to rig up a power source and whatnot, but that's entry-level hobby electronics, and hopefully "warm white" will be a good search term for off-the-shelf products like what you're looking for, too.
posted by Alterscape at 8:28 PM on November 14, 2014 [1 favorite]


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