PH 80 Table vs Floor vs Portable Lamp: How to Choose

Louis Poulsen makes the PH 80 in three forms: a table lamp, a floor lamp and a rechargeable portable one. They share a silhouette and a lighting principle, yet they are not interchangeable, because each was drawn for a different height and a different seat. Here is how the three differ in size, light source and placement, and how to tell which version your room is asking for.

One design from 1974, three ways to stand it up

Louis Poulsen introduced the PH 80 in 1974, the year Poul Henningsen would have turned eighty. The tribute was to his method rather than to any single earlier lamp: the three-shade System PH he had been refining since the 1920s, with every curve derived from the logarithmic spiral so that the bulb never meets the eye from a seated or standing position.

Light leaves a PH fixture only after it has struck the shades, which is why one can sit at eye level in a small room without turning into a bright spot. The PH 80 states that idea in the materials of its own decade. The shades are white opal acrylic rather than painted metal, lighter and very even in their glow, and a concealed red top reflector warms the reflected light towards candlelight. Look into a lit PH 80 from across the room and you see three glowing bands, no filament.

Below the shades the three versions part company. Each has its own diameter, its own light source and its own way of reaching power, and those three facts decide where it belongs.

The three side by side

Everything below comes from the specifications for each version, gathered so the differences are easy to scan before reading on.

PH 80 Table Lamp: sideboard height, warm and steady

The PH 80 Table Lamp stands 405 mm tall on a 320 mm footprint and weighs 6.0 kg, which puts the top shade just above the eye of anyone sitting beside it. That is the height at which the shade geometry does its best work: you see the three opal bands glowing, never the E14 bulb inside them. The shades are high-pressure moulded white opal acrylic with a polycarbonate top shade, the stem is high-lustre chrome-plated or white lacquered steel, and the base is moulded ABS.

What it gives is warm, diffuse, indirect light rather than a working pool, so treat it as a room lamp instead of a task lamp. A sideboard, a generous bedside table, a reception desk, the corner of a living room that needs a soft anchor after dark: those are its places. The cord runs 2.5 m with the switch on it, which allows a little freedom in siting the lamp away from the socket. Two colourways are offered, opal white with a high lustre chrome plated stem or opal white with a white stem, and the rating is IP20 for indoor use.

PH 80 Floor Lamp: the reading corner

The PH 80 Floor Lamp is the same design at architectural scale: 550 mm across the widest shade, 1315 mm tall, and 17.6 to 17.9 kg depending on the finish. The extra diameter matters more than the extra height. A wider bottom shade throws a broader, softer pool downwards, generous enough to read by, while the opal shades keep the whole corner glowing instead of lighting one hard circle in the middle of the floor.

It takes a single E27 bulb (E26 compatible) up to 70 W, and a sensible match is an E27 LED of around 8 to 10 W and roughly 1055 lm. The cable is 2.6 m, and the version you choose carries either a switch or a dimmer on that cable. Decide which early: the dimmer is what lets one lamp serve an evening of reading and then the low, quiet light you want later on. Three stems are available, high lustre chrome plated, black or white, with a smooth ABS base on the black and white versions. At more than 17 kg this is not a lamp you move on a whim, so give it a settled corner beside a chair or at the end of a sofa.

PH 80 Portable Lamp: the one that follows you

The PH 80 Portable Lamp keeps the silhouette and reduces it to 305 mm tall and 1.8 kg, light enough to carry in one hand. The three-shade System PH is here in white opal acrylic, in injection-moulded polycarbonate shades with a clear polycarbonate diffuser, and the top, cone, heat sink, stem and base are aluminium, which is where the weight saving comes from.

In place of a bulb there is a built-in rechargeable LED of 4 W at 2700 K, with the switch on the base. The stated runtime is roughly five hours at full output and up to 32 hours dimmed, recharged over USB-C with a 1.5 m cord. Because it is rated IP44 it can also go outdoors, so a single lamp moves from the dinner table to a balcony rail to a bedside table with no socket in reach. In a compact flat that flexibility can stand in for two or three fixed fittings, a point we return to in our guide to portable designer lamps.

Which one belongs in your room

Start from the seat, not from the floor plan. If light has to fall on a page in a chair, the floor lamp is the only one of the three with the diameter and the dimmer to manage it. If you want a warm glow at sideboard or bedside height that then stays exactly where you put it, the table lamp is the lighter, quieter answer at 6.0 kg on a 2.5 m cord. If the light has to travel, to a dinner table tonight and a terrace tomorrow, the portable is the only version that leaves the socket behind.

Two of them in one home read as a set rather than a repetition, because the shade geometry is identical at every scale: a floor lamp in the reading corner with a portable on the dining table is a natural pairing, and the PH 80 Table Lamp slots between them at sideboard height. All three sit within the wider Louis Poulsen collection, next to the PH designs the 1974 tribute was drawn to celebrate.