my desk lamp died after 3yrs of hard use.

I am thinking about buying LED desklamp.

Has anyone used an LED desk lamp? is it bright enough for reading books at the table?

I don´t think a light emmited from LED is comfortable enough for the eyes. The color spectrum is too narrow.
Maybe there is some advancement in this field though.

If you have a LED flashlight you can test whether you find it comfortable enough to work/read/etc. in the light emmited from LED. Try it for a long time.

well it depends on the LED light it self. You van buy fairly good LED light bulbs, which will fit in standard fittings. Availible in various of tints.

The LED desklights with just a row of 5mm LED's are a bit to blueish and not very nice to work with for a long time.

I just got one. It's strange, kind of like working by the light of an arc welder. But as a reading lamp, I actually kind of like it. Wal-Mart now has a large selection of screw-in LED replacement bulbs. My wife hated them, they were sent to the basement as task lighting, except for one, which my son took for his room because it looks like a space-alien lightbulb.

LED's are definitely not for room lighting, but as an accent light or utility light, they make the grade.

The older Luxeon K2 LED emitter seems to give better overall colour accuracy than the latest Crees (which are more power efficient but can be to high a colour temperature).

If you need a replacement then I would try one of these in a conventional desklamp.

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.15734

Many LED desklamps are pretty horrible. At least if you don't like the K2 LED you can replace it with a conventional tungsten filament bulb.

It is hard to make any make or model recommendations.

Your subjective preference and tolerance for the color rendering of a particular set of LEDs used in a specific make and model of lamp will determine how well you like the lamp. Some people don't seem to be sensitive to less than perfect lighting but others quickly suffer eye strain and headaches.

How you use the lamp will also make a difference. Diffuse lighting might allow a slightly off color rendition to get by. Whereas if your using the lamp primarily as a reading lamp your probably going to want much better color rendition. I use a small LED light, one with a decidedly blue tinge, for short-term task lighting. In that role the relatively poor color rendering is acceptable. If I tried to read for six hours using the same light I would suffer and go cross-eyed.

LEDs have gotten better over time. The best 'white' LEDs used to be decidedly blue. Now, the 'white' LEDs are much warmer and much closer to daylight, which remains the gold standard for color rendition. At any price point the 'white' LEDs are much whiter but the best are still slightly blue and you will have to pay for the best quality and rendering LEDs.

Some manufacturers have tried to mix in some red LEDs to compensate as an aggregate for the blue tinge. Some of these work better than others and a lot depends on the user.

The best advice is to decide how you will be using the light so you know how to weigh the importance of the color rendering. If your looking for a reading lamp be prepared to spend money. Once you know that the best way is to go out and try the lights.

Take a small print book you haven't read. Try reading with the light for a bit to gauge how it effects your eyes.

Also you might take a glossy magazine with a lot of bright colors and flesh tones. Under the light your testing do the colors look good. Do the flesh tones look right?

Some people have concluded that LED lighting is not good enough yet for protracted reading and task lighting. Compact fluorescent lighting has advanced to to be able to do this job but you have to buy quality and spend money to get it. A fifteen watt compact fluorescent with a high color rendering index may be your best choice if your sensitive to these issues.

Small halogen lights have excellent color rendering and the lamps are cheap. They are not as efficient as compact florescents or LEDs. They also produce considerable amounts of heat for lumen output. Efficiency and heat may be an issue but in very small watt units, 15 to 20 watts, the actual loss isn't much of a burden.

The only LED reading I have done is a paperback novel using a 3-LED headlamp. For no more than two hours at a time. The hotspot of the beam makes reading feel a little unnatural, but still workable. I didn't have any unnatural color issues, but then I was only reading a paperback - black text on the typical light cream colored paper - so no colors that needed to be represented accurately. Reading was not difficult, but a more diffuse beam with zero hotspot would have been more comfortable. Also, I was juggling getting progressive bifocals into position for reading as well as the LED headlamp, so I was doing double-adjustment duty. Those of you with younger eyes and no bifocals would only have the single-adjustment of controlling the LED hotspot placement. I would not choose to read by LED headlamp given other choices, but if that's all you have it's better than nothing. For general reading I want bright and very flat diffuse illumination ... something that LEDs can't quite provide yet (to the best of my knowledge).

I'm looking for one also, but have decided to switch to halogens, gotta agree with Art on this one.

we use those full spectrum "sunlight" bulbs for our reading lamps.they are sort of pricy but we only have two and they are not only easy on the eyes but all the colors in magazines stand out better..