Best flashlights for camping

A flashlight in a dark kitchen produces one bright circle and a room full of hard shadow. A 360-degree lantern at a quarter of the output makes the room usable. That is the whole argument for owning one.

IPX7 on an outage light matters because outages and weather arrive together.

Replaceable cells rather than a sealed pack is the correct choice for something that sits in a cupboard for two years between uses.

Skip this ifyou need to walk outside with it. A lantern spreads light everywhere, which is exactly wrong on a dark path.

Three alkaline AAA cells hold roughly 3.9 Wh between them at a modest draw. That is comparable to the Swift LT's entire battery, for a couple of dollars, available in any gas station in the country.

The red mode is the feature people end up using most. It preserves night adaptation and does not wake a tent.

350 lumens looks modest next to a 3,000-lumen listing. On a footpath at walking pace it is more light than you need, and it will still be running when the 3,000-lumen light has stepped down twice.

Skip this ifyou want one lamp for everything including work. There is no real flood mode and no high-CRI option.

1,100 lumens is enough to light a whole room to a level where you can read and cook, which is the difference between coping with an outage and enduring one.

The USB output is the second reason to own it. In a multi-day outage, the phone is the thing that matters.

Rechargeable rather than replaceable cells is a real trade-off for emergency kit: better in a planned outage, worse if it has been in a cupboard for eighteen months. The red LED is the hedge: 1 lumen for a published 348 hours means a flat-ish pack still gives you two weeks of find-the-stairs light.

Skip this ifit will sit untouched for years. For pure standby, replaceable cells beat a rechargeable pack every time.

IPX7 on AAA cells is the specification that makes this interesting. Almost everything else in the AAA class is IPX4, which means rain and nothing more.

Three lithium AAA cells hold roughly 4.5 Wh and shrug off cold in a way alkalines do not. On this lamp that combination is worth more than another 500 lumens.

Princeton Tec publishes an output and a runtime for each of its four modes, plus an 85 m beam distance and a 92 g weight - not a single flattering maximum. The 85 m works back to about 1,806 candela, or 3.3 candela per lumen, which says the 550 lumens buys width rather than reach.

Skip this ifweight is your constraint. The AAA carriage that makes it robust also makes it bigger than the Li-ion competition.

2.75 hours at 600 lumens from two CR123A cells is a very efficient result — that is roughly 6 watt-hours doing real work rather than being thrown away as heat.

3 m of impact resistance is the highest figure in this roundup. Polymer absorbs a drop that would dent an aluminum body.

119 g with cells installed makes this the lightest full-size duty light here.

Skip this ifyou use a light daily. CR123A primaries are the wrong economics for frequent use; buy a rechargeable instead.