Best camping lanterns

Soft, even light instead of a glare spot, plus a USB output. The most pleasant lantern here.

Most camping lanterns are a bright LED behind clear plastic, which produces a glare spot that makes everything outside its cone look darker. This one wraps the LEDs in a fabric diffuser, and the result is genuinely usable light you can sit next to rather than squint past. The USB output earns it real credit on this site because it removes a separate power bank from the packing list. The trade is the rechargeable battery: when it is flat at a site with no power, it is a paperweight, where an AA lantern takes new cells. Bring it charged, and bring a backup light.

Runs for a long time on D cells you can buy anywhere. Unexciting and extremely dependable.

The dependable answer, and the one to buy if you distrust rechargeables. D cells are heavy and awkward, but they are available at any store in the country and they deliver genuinely long runtime at a low setting -- enough for a whole weekend without thinking about it. The light quality is the weakness: a bright LED behind clear plastic gives you a glare source rather than ambient light, which is tiring to sit beside. For a lantern that hangs inside a tent and gets switched on at low power, it does the job for very little money.

Rechargeable with a hand crank and a solar input. The lantern that always has a fallback.

The crank is the point. Every other rechargeable lantern on this page becomes useless when the battery is flat and there is no power, and this one does not -- a minute of cranking buys you enough light to find what you need. The directional mode is the other genuinely good idea: lighting one half of the globe doubles the effective runtime when you are sitting on one side of it. Be realistic about the crank, though: it is an emergency measure, not a charging strategy, and the lantern is bulkier and pricier than the alternatives. Buy it if being without light would be a real problem.

Pocket-size, rechargeable, and bright enough for inside a tent. Not a campsite lantern.

This is the lantern you keep in the tent, not the one you cook by. It is small enough that bringing it is not a decision, the frosted globe gives pleasant close-range light for reading or finding things, and it hangs easily from a tent loop. Be clear about the limit: maximum output is modest by design and it will not light a cooking area or a picnic table. Think of it as the companion to a bigger lantern rather than a replacement for one, and expect to charge it between trips because there is no battery to swap.

An inflatable solar lantern that packs to a disc. Dim, weightless, and nearly free to run.

The packed-size champion of the lighting category. Deflated it is a disc that slides into any gap in a bag, it charges itself from the sun, and it needs no cable or battery, which makes it the easiest thing on this page to simply always have with you. The honest limits are brightness and weather dependence: it is ambient light rather than task light, and a few overcast days leave it short. The inflatable body is also the long-term wear point. Buy it as the light you never have to plan for, alongside a real lantern.

Burns propane for genuinely bright light and real heat. An old format with real drawbacks.

The traditional format, and still the brightest thing here by a wide margin. If you want to genuinely light a cooking area outdoors, a propane mantle lantern does it in a way LEDs do not, and it shares fuel with a propane stove. But the drawbacks are serious and worth stating plainly: it is an open flame, which means it must never be used inside a tent, it is restricted or banned during the fire restrictions that cover much of the western US for months at a time, and the hot glass and housing are a real burn risk with kids or a dog around. The mantles are also fragile and break in transit, so carry spares.