My colleagues got back from Lightfair in New York last week raving about the big shift to LED products at this year's show. This is important because a first, critical step for LED lighting is to generate interest among lighting designers. And this was the year that exhibitors at Lightfair decided that they need to show off their LED products to get noticed.

Vrinda Bhandarkar, our LED lighting market expert, notes that it takes events like this to create the interest, and then the lighting designers can start specifying products they want. These designers write the specs for big projects, like commercial buildings and such. Those projects help to drive LED volumes up and prices down enough to reach even wider markets.

And for once, the standards won't be holding the market back. Finalized last year were the standards on solid-state lighting definitions (IES RP-16 (a)), photometric testing (IES LM-79), lumen depreciation testing (IES LM-80), and chromaticity (ANSI C78.377).

If you want more detail on Lightfair, see the great coverage in the daily articles in LEDs Magazine .

Oh, and I'll make a shameless plug here for Vrinda's most recent market reports: LED replacement lamps (2009), LED Lighting Fixtures (2009), and HB-LEDs for Lighting (2008). The replacement lamp report is just coming out--we'll comment on that soon.