5 Of The Best Lighting Gear Options To Brighten Your Camping Trip (According To Reviews)

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When you go camping, there are lots of things to remember, including camping bags, tents, food and water, stuff to start fires, and more. Some folks solve this in some creative ways, like camping in the bed of their truck, or even bringing along some high-tech camping equipment to make the experience more comfortable. Others sometimes take the bare essentials to lead a more spartan camping trip. Regardless, one thing that just about everyone needs when they go camping is a light of some kind. 

Much like other useful camping gadgets, lights come in all shapes and sizes. You can take along a trusty flashlight or lantern to keep things simple, while others may want to be more decorative with camping-specific string lights and other colorful lighting. For those who go glamping, there's even a good selection of USB-powered lights for you to choose from. For the most part, though, people tend to stick to the classics. 

The good news is that those products have improved dramatically over the last century. Today's modern lighting is brighter, adjustable, and lighter than its predecessors. Plus, you have more varieties to choose from now than ever before. Finding a good flashlight isn't terribly difficult. As long as it turns on when you need it, then you're good to go. If you want to up your lighting game a little more, here is some of the best camping lighting that we could find. 

The Sofirn BLF LT1 has all of the features you'd typically look for in a lantern. The shell is made of aluminum, and it's sealed up enough to garner an IPX7 rating, which means it can be submerged in up to one meter of water for a little while. Like most modern camping lights, this one is adjustable in a couple of different ways. It can reach brightnesses up to 800 lumens. It can also output warm white light at 2,700K or a neutral white at 5,000K. 

This lantern is small enough to hold in your hand and light enough to hang from just about anywhere. It's bright enough to provide good light, and the diffuser will keep it from blinding you at night. Reviews agree that it has very few flaws for its intended use case and its ability to shrug off water makes it ideal for outdoor use. 

In its basic modes, the light does everything a camper needs it to do. However, it's also suitable for power users with its Anduril 2 system. With it, you can pop the lantern into advanced mode and program what the buttons do. For example, you can reduce the minimum brightness or lock out some features for safety reasons. It takes some patience to do the programming, but that makes this lantern among the most configurable on the market. This lantern can be had on Amazon for less than $100 and often goes on sale. 

Sometimes a simple flashlight is just what the metaphorical doctor ordered, and for that, the Wurkkos FC11C strikes a good balance between simple, well-built, and affordable. It's made from aluminum and has a bit of heft to it while also being IP68 water and dust resistant, a boon for campers. It's small enough to easily fit in a person's hand or pocket and it comes with a clip so you can attach it to a backpack or belt to keep it out of the way. In addition, it outputs light at 1,200 lumens and has a beam distance of over 450 feet. The battery is rechargeable with a USB-C cable and Wurkkos makes it in both 4,000K and 5,000K light temperatures. 

As a flashlight, it's actually quite good. You get a bright, affordable light that only costs around $35, but often dips to the low $20 range when it goes on sale. The good news with this flashlight is that it's just a solid flashlight. You get all of the above features and it isn't a complicated piece of tech. Just a bright, simple flashlight that works as expected. Some reviewers have complained about small things, like how the light control can be a little hard to find in the dark at first. However, it makes up for it with little niceties like a magnetic base that is strong enough to hold the flashlight in any orientation. Overall, it's a solid camping flashlight. 

The Wurkkos FC11C is already pretty small, but if you want a really small flashlight that packs away easily, the RovyVon A1 Gen 4 is about the best option in the ultra-small flashlight category. Since it is easy to put in any backpack or pocket, one of the best features it has is a lockout mode that keeps the light from being accidentally turned on in your pack, which would cause the battery to drain. Otherwise, its greatest strength is that it's small enough to be easily affixed to a keychain while still providing 650 lumens of light on high settings. We also liked the moonlight mode which grants 0.5 lumens, helping the user to preserve their night vision. 

In terms of construction, it's a plastic PU material and the flashlight comes with an IPX6 water resistance rating. That means it can't be submerged but can take splashes like you get with rain. Reviewers praised the flashlight's lockout mode and small stature. It's a little bit bigger than a AA battery. It also charges with USB-C, and its smaller battery means it doesn't take very long at all to charge. RovyVon says that it can last up to 56 hours in moonlight mode, but you'll get maybe several hours on the higher power modes. If this one isn't doing it for you, there are several other very good rechargeable flashlights that you can swap it with.

The BioLite brand is fairly well known for making good camping lanterns. It makes mostly solar-powered lights that charge during the day in the sun and then shine at night as needed. Fully charged, its produces can last about a full day, give or take a couple of hours, although it likely won't get a full charge over the course of one day of sunlight. Fortunately, both lights are rechargeable via USB-C as well.

First, let's talk about the BioLite Solar String. This is a 44-foot stringed light set with 20 bulbs. It comes with roughly 25 hours of rated life and multiple brightness settings. There is a color variant as well as a white-only variant that you can choose from. Both of them come with mostly the same features with one being able to cycle through various colors and one having only white. Both sets of lights are IPX4, which means they can be rained on without any problems. It's best used for campsite lighting rather than tent lighting where it is definitely overkill. 

The other option is the BioLite Luci lantern, which is much better for tent use. It has a few variants to choose from, although we like the model with the larger battery. It lights up at 360 lumens max, which isn't too bright and can light a tent without problems. It's also inflatable, so you can pack it away quite easily.

Black Diamond is a popular purveyor of lighting equipment for hikers and campers, so we'd be remiss not to include them here. For the purposes of camping, the two products we think would go best with most camping setups is the Black Diamond Moji lantern and the Storm 500-R headlamp. The lantern is a fairly simple design that should work in most tents while Black Diamond's headlamps are considered among the best rechargeable headlamps in the business. 

For the Moji lantern, this is a good example of excellent in simplicity. It's a little blob-shaped lantern that is super easy to use. It has either one or two buttons on the front (depending on the model) that do all of the work and it's small enough to fit into an adult's hand. It also comes with hook-style clips for mounting on various surfaces and a max lighting capacity of 150 lumens. It also boasts an IPX4 rating, so it can resist water splashes, and is also powered by either a rechargeable battery or regular batteries. It's your call. 

The Storm 500-R headlamp is also great for camping, especially if you have to walk away from the main camp area. It comes with an IP67 water resistance rating, so it can be submerged in up to one meter of water for up to 30 minutes. You also get 500 lumens of brightness, and multi-colored lights as well. For the most part, it's rock solid, although its micro-USB charging port is a little old school for our tastes. 

To start, we sorted through dozens of posts from people asking this very question to get a feel for what brands were most often recommended by other people. We also sourced other blogs to see what the bloggers were recommending these days. From there, each product was run through FakeFind, which is essentially FakeSpot's replacement now that Mozilla has shut that down, and then further narrowed the list down. 

There are far more than five good products in this category, so we wanted to focus mostly on the ones that had the best chance of solving the problem. The Moji and Luci lanterns are small, water resistant, and aren't so bright that they ruin your night vision. Meanwhile, the flashlight selections are different sizes with a headlamp thrown in for good measure. We also wanted to make sure to throw in some solar-powered lights for good measure along with some good old-fashioned battery-powered lights, like the Black Diamond Moji. That way you could choose betwene a lantern, flashlight, or headlamp and then powered by regular or old school batteries. 

Once all of those things happened, the list came together, and it was just arbitrary culling at that point. For example, the Wurkkos flashlight is just as good as the Sofirn SD06, when comparing each one's intended use case, but we already had a Sofirn lantern on the list, so we gave the spot to Wurkkos.