Home Appliances
Study Lamps
A study lamp is a bulb, a switch and something to hold them over a page, which makes it remarkable how many of them are dead within a year. The aisle sells watts, milliamp-hours and eye-care stickers, and not one of those numbers tells you whether the thing will still be lighting a page next winter.
Study lamp reviews
How to choose a study lamp in India
The headline number on almost every listing is wattage, and on an LED lamp it is close to meaningless - 6W of cheap diodes behind a diffuser can throw less usable light onto a page than 4.9W of decent ones. The number that would actually tell you something is lumens, and hardly any brand in this aisle publishes it. So you are left reading owner reports for the one word that matters: dim. When several buyers of the same lamp independently say they cannot comfortably read under it, that is more reliable than anything on the box.
The second question decides more than brand does: mains or rechargeable. Rechargeable lamps sell on the promise of studying through a power cut, and the runtimes that brands themselves quote are one and a half to three and a half hours at full brightness when the lamp is new. Owner reports across every brand describe that collapsing to twenty or thirty minutes somewhere between month two and year one, with the light visibly sagging as the cell drains. A mains lamp is as bright in hour six as in minute one, and a mains lamp with a standard B22 bulb has the one property nothing else in this category offers: when the light dies you replace a hundred-rupee bulb instead of the whole lamp. That is why we weight architecture over features here. A sealed LED strip is a lamp with a built-in expiry date, and the warranty that is supposed to cover it is worth less than it reads - several brands in this aisle contradict their own warranty length between the product page and the specification table.