On a bedside lamp with an integrated LED, the light source is part of the fitting. There is no lampholder, no bulb to replace, and no way to change the character of the light later by swapping in something warmer. That buys shapes a bulb could never fit inside — and it means the specification you buy is the specification you keep, so it is worth reading properly.
An integrated module is soldered to a board inside the lamp, usually behind a diffuser rather than under a shade. Compared with an E14 or E27 fitting it allows a much slimmer body, a continuous line of light, or a head only a couple of centimetres deep. The cost is commitment: brightness, beam and colour are fixed at the factory. If you like to tune a room by changing bulbs, a lamp with a socket suits you better; if you want the shape, integrated is the only way to get it.
Watts stopped describing brightness years ago. A bedside LED drawing 4 W and one drawing 8 W can produce similar light, so read the lumen figure: 150–250 lm for a glow to find a glass of water by, 400–700 lm if the lamp also has to carry a book. The second number worth finding is the colour rendering index. CRI 80 is the ordinary floor and looks fine; CRI 90 and above renders paper, wood and skin without the faintly grey cast cheap modules give, which is noticeable in a small room lit by one lamp.
Only if it says so. An integrated LED has driver electronics between the mains and the diodes, and a wall dimmer designed for filament bulbs will make a non-dimmable driver flicker, hum, or refuse to start. Three arrangements are common: fixed output, stepped output (typically 100/50/25 % cycled by touching the base) and fully variable dimming. Stepped touch control is the easiest thing to operate in the dark, because you cannot overshoot it.
Cheap drivers pass a ripple from the mains through to the light output. You will not usually see it, but some people register it as eye strain or a headache after an hour of reading, and a phone camera pointed at the lamp will often show banding that the eye misses. It is the single most useful two-second test to run on an LED lamp you already own, and a good argument for buying a named driver rather than the cheapest module on the shelf.
Because an LED can be driven at a fraction of its rated output without changing colour much, integrated models often add things a bulb lamp cannot do: a 30-minute sleep timer, a dusk-to-dawn sensor, a motion sensor for a hallway or a child's room, or a 5 % "night mode" that is bright enough to navigate by and dim enough not to wake anyone. If a lamp is going on a landing rather than a nightstand, the motion sensor is the feature that matters most.
Not on an integrated model — the module and the lamp are one unit. In practice the driver, switch or touch sensor usually fails first, and an external plug-in driver is far easier to replace than one potted into the base.
Modules are rated 15,000 to 50,000 hours to L70, the point at which 70 % of the original brightness remains. LEDs fade rather than fail, so that rating marks when you would start to notice, not when the lamp stops working.
The technology is not the problem; the colour temperature is. A 2700 K LED is no worse at bedtime than a filament bulb. A 6500 K one is considerably worse than either, whatever it is made of.
The body warms up, because the metal housing is doing the cooling that an LED needs. Hand-warm is normal; what is not safe is covering the lamp with a cloth or a pillow, which traps that heat.
To browse by room and style rather than by light source, start from the full bedside lamps range.
