Enhance the Print Screen Function!

very good
key review info
application features
  • Full screen, window and area capture
  • (4 more, see all...)

Taking screenshots is an operation easy to do within Windows. All you have to do is press the PrintScreen key to capture the entire screen or combine it with Alt to capture only the active area. Capturing only a part of the screen requires additional work on the shots obtained using the previous method.

As usual, most hard things can be made easier using a computer program. This time, the target program is a screen capture tool called Gadwin PrintScreen. Even better, this program is completely free!

PrintScreen recently reached version 3.5.1462. Its installation kit has only 1MB in size and installation passes like a dream. Let's see more of it!

This program usually stays inside the system tray and helps you taking screen shots, just as easy as that! You will get to see its interface when changing settings and before saving the screen shots taken.

The Preferences area allows you to change capture settings, like assigning a keyboard shortcut for capturing the screen, setting a time delay before capture, previewing the captured image and more. It would have been nice to have keyboard shortcuts for different capture modes, like MWSnap...

The Source tab handles the different capture modes available. There are four of them: current window, client window, full screen and rectangular area. For each of these, you can choose whether to capture the mouse cursor or not.

These sound fine, but in reality I found some small issues with the first two capture modes. Usually they won't capture anything; in some cases the captured windows miss the title bar. The modes that work well are the last two ones.

Next, we should set the Destination of our captured screens. The available choices are fair enough for most of us, the only thing missing is a FTP server upload. The shots can be placed into the clipboard, saved to a file, printed or sent through email. Here you can also change File settings such as file naming, capture directory and the program used to open shots after they're saved.

At last, the Image settings allow five image file formats for saving, starting with BMP and ending with TGA. The saved images can also be resized, converted to grayscale and have a shadow added to them.

The preview window has the ability to zoom into your picture with a ratio from 10% up to 500%, but no editing features.

This is it for me now; I'll let you discover this little program for yourselves, but first...

The Good

Gadwin PrintScreen supports five file formats, can send shots through email and it's also free. Even though that was not needed, the Help file is very detailed and can be the perfect guide for absolute beginners.

The Bad

Using the Image Shadow and Gray scale image attributes at the same time will result in a black filled image. The solution that I found is to have only one of them enabled at a time, but there are also other issues that I mentioned until now. At last, this program lacks even the most basic image editing features.

The Truth

When I saw this new release of Gadwin PrintScreen I thought that the replacement for MWSnap is here, but it seems I was wrong. This program is on the right path, but unfortunately it's still too buggy for me (or for my computer...or for both).

Don't get me wrong, many of you may find this extremely useful and easy to use. Above everything, it's completely free, so take your time to try it, at least. Good luck!

Here are some snapshots of the application in action:

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user interface 4
features 2
ease of use 4
pricing / value 5


final rating 4
Editor's review
very good
 
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