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As some of you are aware I have 3 lights suspended from the ceiling above the keyboard of my music room piano.

Last week one of these gave up the ghost. I thought it would be good to make sure that I had identical bulbs in the three sockets. The only 3 matching bulbs available in the small electrical retailer's shop were 10 Watt LED units.

Having exchanged the old ones, and having sat down and played- well the difference is amazing. The light is just so much better for my eyes. I wish I had had these from the day I built the music room.

Believe it or not, most people here still buy the incandescent bulbs, because the unit price is lower.

For less eye fatigue, it is best to choose the ones with a "warm" color. These are usually identified as having a color temperature in the range 2700K to 3000K. I converted my entire house (more than 50 bulbs) to LED 3 years ago.

I put in a LED bulb in my piano lamp and it’s been great. It has warm color temp, lasts longer, does not put out any heat.

Yes the low heating and much light per watt is good.

But I'm holding back on LED lighting because of the low color quality of the light. The average LED stuff is about 80% CRI which is same as a cheap TL light, with sharp peaks in the spectrum. This results in faded looking colors. They also often flicker just like TL.

There is high quality LED lighting but it is very expensive, say $500 for a 10 pack of 95 CRI LED TL's...

Regarding the unit price, be aware that the "lifetime" of energy-saving lights is often greatly exaggerated. Especially when they get hot (eg when they are in an enclosure) their life time drops fast. Also some lights do last long but fade or de-color quick, making them useless long before their "lifetime". I have some $0.50 incandescent bulbs lasting already over 10 years here. Hard to beat that

Sorry... What are CRI and TL?

Know an old lady who is paranoid about the new bulbs being cold and possibly giving off radiation or contain poisons like mercury when they're broken.

When it comes to color, found some 9W=60 bulbs made by Philips that come in 3 colors: Warm White 2700K, Bright White 3500K & Daylight White 5000K. Personally prefer Bright White with a color like the sun through the window in the middle of the day but not too white like a fluorescent or too warm like sunset glow.

The CFLs (compact fluorescent) 10 years ago lasted a long time but the quality control isn't all that consistent. I've had some that lasted for 12 years while some of the same ones with the same brand only lasted for 5 years.

+1. The make I use is Topaz. Quality and dimmer compatibility vary between makes, Topaz is good....

I'm happy with the ones from Ikea for longevity, quality, cost, and cost of operation.

I don't know how much all of you are paying for bulbs vs electricity prices, but certainly here in Australia the cost of not using LEDs is too high. So much so that the government has set up a scheme to allow contractors to visit homes to exchange all non-energy efficient globes over to LEDs - at no cost to residents. But maybe our electricity is a lot more expensive than most. LEDs are very cheap for us now, Compact Flouros are cheaper still, incandescent is now almost as expensive as CFs - not sure if that's an inducement to change over or because of low volume.

Here incandescent is banned by the government -- sort of. You can still get tungsten halogen quartz, and decorative specialty ones like the candelabra type. I saved a bunch of regular tungsten argon borosilicate incandescents because the light quality from CF is so very poor. But now I'm going with LED, because the light is very close to Planckian like an incandescent, the efficiency is much better, and there's no heat to roast the sockets and switches. I may let go of the incandescent stash.....

I just bought an incandescent 50-100-150 3 way in a Target. I think the "Ban" is a little ephemeral like the US converting to metric measurement or the Do Not Call List. I'm still finding color temperature to be hit and miss with LED's. I use them in some places but in others the yellowish "soft white" of tungsten is like the warmth of vacuum tubes in audio and I hoard my incandescent in case they ever get serious about not making them anymore.

This might be a stupid question.

I am using the lights to read black ink on white paper. Does the colour of the light matter?

We humans have a tendency to interpret the prevailing ambient light as "white," whatever its spectral composition might actually be. Most of us, for example, can't detect the change in colour of daylight between, say, mid-day and 3pm, although the difference is very noticeable to a measuring instrument. That's why photographers have to be concerned about the notion of "white balance" -- the camera's film or sensor will record what is actually there, not what we perceive.

People make a big deal about "daylight coloured" lighting, but the colour of daylight is not very constant. There are specialist reading lamps whose colour temperature is supposed to be better because of this or that, but I'm not sure what objective evidence there is, if any, for the improvements they claim to offer.

If it has not already been done, it would be interesting to study how (say) sight-reading accuracy was affected by the colour profile of different kinds of ambient light, with equivalent intensity. I would expect there to be extremes of the red end and blue end of the spectrum where our optical machinery doesn't work very well, and a huge range in the middle where the light makes little difference. But that's just a wild guess. I would love to know if anybody has actually studied this objectively.

This is a whole subject in itself and has been throroughly studied by most of the LED light bulb manufacturers. The main manufacturers produce very well-tailored light covering most of the spectrum by using a multiplicity of frequencies that mimic a black-body radiator at the given temperature (say 2700K). They had a lot of trouble with producing LEDs with this mix initially, and a lot of LEDs worked, but failed to give the required freqiuency mix. These LEDs were sold off at semi-scrap rate to many Chinese producers who put them into light bulbs. There was a period when cheap 'warm white' was often a ghastly yellow monochrome.

The main manufacturers never did this. So there used to be a heck of a difference between various manufacturers output, and after being caught out by this, I now only ever buy Philips Master series LED bulbs.That said, the manufacturing process is now much better and the rubbish ones that were sold cheaply are getting to be a thing of the past, and can now be nearly as good as the good ones - but there's no guarantee.

If you're a photographer, you may find that some light bulbs give off light that is easy on the eye, but give strange results on the photograph. For those pictures you may need to resort to changing the LEDs or using incandescant light bulbs to get good results.

I'm sure the colour characters of LED bulbs have been studied. My interest, though, is in the specific area of how these characteristics affect human performance at things like sight reading. Or even ordinary reading. There's a company in the UK that makes specialist LED reading lamps, and claims that the effectiveness of its product is backed up by research. However, they don't provide any actual references, and my attempts to find anything in that area have not been successful. I suspect that the manufacturers have carried out a few private, qualitative surveys, and called the job done. But maybe that's just me being cynical.

As for photography, happily these problems are easy-ish to correct in software with digital photography. Less easy with film, I guess.

I've had good luck with the FEIT LED bulbs they sell at Costco. Here in Illinois the price is subsidized by ComEd, so they're dirt cheap. I've replaced everything. I used to like the daylight bulbs, but as I got older I started to prefer the warm bulbs.

I have an LED clip-on piano light that's more blue than the lights in my light fixtures. I'd prefer something warmer, but it's really bright.

Back in the 80s first night in my first apartment in NYC, I couldn't figure out why I had all the lights on but still couldn't see. It turned out my landlady had put 10W bulbs in all the fixtures.

Probably very very little -- There's no reason we couldn't read Christmas carols printed in green on red paper. At most it would be a minor irritation.

Lighting that instantly improves sight reading? I'M IN!!!

Yes, we adjust to whatever we encounter and try to make white of it. There's no such thing as color in physics. It only exists in our heads. Our eyes take the physical wave lengths that come in, and run them through three different weighting functions -- long, medium, and short wavelengths, basically red, green, and blue -- and report that to the brain. We see with three primary colors, pigeons have five.

LED's actually produce fairly narrow bands, in red, green, and blue. There are theatrical and motion picture lights that use tri-color LED's to produce whatever mix you want. But for household lighting the way they work is to use an extreme short wave blue LED source to activate a mix of phosphors with a broader spectral distribution. Remote phosphor soft lights for motion picture use have interchangeable screens so you can pick the color temperature you want. The improvement in the light from household LED's is the result of better phosphor mixes.