Screen capturing allows you to take pictures of whatever you need from your computer screen: photos, images, text, opened applications, menus etc. You probably wonder why someone would do that, but try print-screening only a certain part of an application you're making a tutorial for. Or, strive taking a picture of your favorite band from their latest video. Have I "captured" your interest?

First and foremost, HyperSnap 6.10.00 is Hyperionics Technology LLC's latest version of screen captures from Windows screens and text capture software. It is shareware and has a 20-days evaluation period during which all functions are available. This version was released on June 22, 2006, so it is recently "baked".

The installation kit is almost 3 megabytes large, so it is worth saving it.

Basically, with this software you have 5 capturing options: FullScreen, Window, Region, DirectX or Glide and Text capture.

The Text capture option allows you to capture editable text from regions on the screen where regular copy/paste functions are not available (dialog boxes, menus, error messages, etc.). The only cases in which Text capture function does not work are: with .pdf files, the programs written in Java and running in Java virtual machine, and texts embedded in JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, BMP image file formats.

The software has an easy-to-use and pretty simple interface, plus an interesting collection of hot-keys both for screen capture and TextSnap option, which, in addition, are user-definable. However, there is an issue or not, depending on the user, with the hot-keys: if you have similar applications running on your computer, it will give you a message on installation that it could not import those hot-keys. But, as I have said, they are user-definable, so this should not constitute such a big problem.

In the Capture tab of the menu you have a number of options ready to respond to your capturing needs. At the bottom of the tab there are two pretty interesting options, namely Capture Settings and Screen Capture Hot Keys. In the Capture Settings option you can make the editing, printing and TextSnap settings for your picture. In Screen Capture Hot Keys you can define all the screen capture keys. The TextSnap Hot Keys and Settings are placed in the newly created, special tab TextSnap.

With the new feature TextSnap you can capture editable text from almost anywhere on the screen, when running under Windows 2000, XP or newer. This version includes image capture, editing, annotation and manipulation tools. Image editing gathers a suite of options like crop, cut out strip, change resolution, scale, auto-trim, mirror, rotate, shear, emboss, sharpen, blur and frame. The options can be used for enhancing the picture.

DirectX and Glide games screen capturing is also included in this new and improved version.

Some interesting features like image viewer and format converter (supports over 20 image formats among which: .psd, .pct, .ico, .bmp, .tga, .ras) and the non-rectangular window capture give the software a shot for the best prepared product in the field.


The Good

It has lots of new and interesting features, especially the TextSnap with auto scroll. A nice thing about the program is that it has a very explicit and complete Help menu that will guide you through every step of your work.


The Bad

Unfortunately, HyperSnap has a bit of a problem with capturing videos and one option is disabling the "hardware acceleration" of your graphics controller. This happens with all video, no matter if it comes from a movie file, Internet, DVD or VCD. After setting your graphics controller "hardware acceleration" to none, the issue is simply just not worth mentioning.


The Truth

I hope they will solve the problem with the external video capturing and add a new feature that allows you to import video files and make captures inside the program. I think that will shoot them directly into the pro league.


All in all, I think you should give it a try with HyperSnap and, who knows, maybe it'll prove good enough for you to buy it ($35). I myself was impressed with its abilities and I think it is definitely worth using it at least until the 20-days evaluation period expires.

Here are some snapshots of the application in action: