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Screen Capture Utilities: SnagIt Snares Print Screen Deluxe

Screen capture utilities can make saving and editing images a breeze

By Lisa Moskowitz, PCWorld   

You%squotre surfing the Web when suddenly you come across a picture of the perfect birthday gift: a vintage Howdy Doody Pez dispenser. You have to e-mail this to your mom right away before she buys you another T-shirt. The easiest thing to do would be to save the image and attach it to an e-mail message, but using the Print Screen key to grab the image and Microsoft%squots basic Paint applet to clean it up is cumbersome. Print Screen can capture only the entire screen, and when you try to edit it you%squotre limited by Paint%squots basic tools.

You can bump up your screen-capturing abilities with Print Screen Deluxe 3.0 from JE Software or SnagIt 4.1 from TechSmith. Both products enhance image capture, but SnagIt offers a more useful set of extra features.

Both utilities can capture the full screen, a window, the clipboard, a user-specified area, or the active window. Both can be activated with a hot key; both can send a capture to disk, printer, or (using a MAPI interface) to e-mail. SnagIt is better for capturing individual elements on the screen. Print Screen Deluxe has more advanced image-editing tools, but SnagIt%squots simple graphics tools are adequate.

SnagIt can capture only the text on a screen, excluding any images. You can wrap words, set the font, and delete blank lines and columns. This is useful for cleaning up text before copying it to a document. SnagIt 4.0 also provides %dquotvideo%dquot capture--really a series of images saved in AVI format. When you open the file, the AVIs play back sequentially like a slide show, along with any animations that were on the screen when you captured it.

SnagIt can scroll as you make your selection, which lets you capture an entire Web page complete with vertical and horizontal scroll bars. But keep in mind that Web page files can fill up quite a bit of hard drive space and take a long time to open. You can also capture drop-down menus and cursor motions--especially useful for pointing out elements on the screen.

New to this version of SnagIt is the Catalog Browser, which lets you store thumbnails of captured screens. To view and edit an image, just double-click its thumbnail. SnagIt also features a preview option, and can save images in six graphic file formats (.bmp, compressed .bmp, .jpg, .tif, .gif, .pcx).

Print Screen Deluxe 3.0 can%squott extract text or capture video or drop-down menus, but it does have superior image-editing tools. Once an image is captured to the Print Screen window, you can rotate, invert, mirror, stretch, sharpen, and crop it. You can pixilate images, lighten and darken colors, or convert color images to black and white or gray scale. SnagIt offers only a fraction of these editing tools.

Another advantage to Print Screen Deluxe is that you can see and start editing your captured image right away in the Print Screen window. In SnagIt, you can view a captured image in a window, but you can%squott edit it there. Instead, you have to open its file.

Despite its extensive editing capabilities, Print Screen Deluxe can save in only four file formats (.bmp, .jpg, .pcx, .png). It also suffers from a confusing interface that leaves you wondering where to begin. For example, to find the capture choices you must first go to Options, then Capture. In SnagIt, you click a button to choose a capture medium (image, text, or video), then go to Input and Output to customize the capture. Your choices are always visible in the SnagIt window.

SnagIt 4.0%squots advanced capture options and friendly interface make it a better buy, even at $39.95. At $29.95 Print Screen Deluxe 3.0 may cost less, but it also captures less. Both products are available now.