>>Cheers Viv. Mmmm, maybe quite an outlay at first - but worth it over the years, i guess. I wonder about dimmablity as well. Not all halogens will respond to the dimmer switch. And don't LEDs use multiples of LEDs to control brightness, so stepping up or down rather than dimming?
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>I have a wind-up hand lamp, and when it's empty, the brightness is linearly proportionate to the handle's speed. So I think just lowering the voltage (or whatever) does it. They may be used in digital things, but they seem to be quite analog in their nature.

Yeah, I guess most lamps (eg those "headlamps") are cheaper to produce as a varied matrix of LEDs rather than including a capacitor? BTW, that wind-up LED lamp is such a cool idea, esp for camping (which goes through batteries in no time). They had them on offer in our local fuel station last year and I didn't get one. Mind you, I bought 3 shell-shaped LED solar powered garden lights and they didn't even last till end of summer, so I guess I was a bit skeptical of such container-load-of-cheap-crap-from-China (such as whose other sole purpose seems to for the of filling up those high street £1 shops)