A camping lantern is indeed a nice thing to have. Candles are atmospheric, sure, but they just don’t put out much light, not to mention being rather temperamental in the wind. And nowadays, stove and lantern makers are manufacturing several models of both stripes that are designed to be compatible with one another.
EasyLight Lantern
Case in point: The Primus Alpine Power Cook stove ($65; www.suuntousa.com/products_primus.htm). It’s a canister-only stove聴and a very good one at that聴with a big cooking surface. And, it has a companion piece in the Alpine EasyLight lantern ($50), a compact, sturdy lantern that generates the equivalent of an 80-watt light bulb. It runs off the same canister as the stove, and any canister with the widely available Lindahl valve will work. The Primus OmniFuel ($140) that you mention is a great stove, maybe the best multi-fuel stove out there. It runs off liquid fuel as well as canisters, but it’s more stove than you’re likely to need. For simplicity’s sake, I’d stick with the canister-only designs.
Of course, you don’t have to stick to one brand for both the stove and lantern. A very clever lantern that’s new this year is the Brunton Liberty ($110; www.brunton.com). The great thing about this one is that it doesn’t need a lantern聴meaning, those mesh globes that act as a light filament but that are of course fragile and fussy to install. Instead, it uses a nearly unbreakable platinum element. And, because it uses fuel with a Lindahl valve, all sorts of canisters fit to it. So you could get one of those along with maybe an MSR WindPro ($70; www.msrcorp.com), which has the advantage of coming with an excellent windscreen.
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