Best Camping Lanterns

A lantern is judged by the opposite of what a flashlight is judged by. The ANSI/PLATO FL1 beam distance figure is the point where the beam falls to 0.25 lux, roughly full moonlight, and peak intensity in candela describes the hottest spot at the center. Both reward a narrow, focused beam, which is exactly what a lantern is built to avoid. So the 800 cd and 57 m printed for the Sofirn LT1 say very little about how it lights a picnic table. What matters here is how evenly the light spreads, how warm it looks, how long it lasts on a low setting and how it hangs.

Across the lights listed here, extra money mostly buys battery capacity and bulk rather than lumens. The Goal Zero Crush Light at $29.95 weighs 3.2 oz and puts out 60 lumens, enough for the inside of a tent. The BioLite AlpenGlow 500 and Goal Zero Lighthouse 600, both $79.95, weigh 13.4 oz and 17.6 oz and are camp-table and power-outage lights. Between them sit the two Sofirns: the LT1S at $41 on a single 21700 cell at 500 lumens, and the LT1 at $62, which runs Anduril 2 and is the one to hang over a group site. The Wurkkos TS27 at $65.99 is a hybrid: a long-range spotlight head with a ring of lantern LEDs.

Color, more than brightness, is what lantern owners keep coming back to. LT1 owners single out the continuous warm-to-cool mixing and the separate red channel, which lets one light do a dim, warm tent glow and a bright neutral light for cooking. Owners of the Nitecore LR60, now discontinued, noted its 90+ CRI diffused beam, rare in a lantern, and that it doubled as a power bank with a magnet and tilting ring. The Olight Obulb Pro, also discontinued, was described as a soft orb to hang in a tent or drop in a bag, and LT1S owners say it balances brightness, runtime and packability without giving up the color mixing.

The neighboring choice is a headlamp. A headlamp lights where one person looks, and around a shared camp it dazzles everyone else; a lantern lights the space, which is why buying guides treat it as the group light. OutdoorGearLab puts 100 lumens or less as enough for two or three people and 200 or more for a larger group, so most lanterns here have headroom to spare.