We capture screen shots all the time. We need them when we write about software. When we want to capture a screen shot we scream: "Who's got the WinGrab disk?" Then we frantically search the offices of the people we think used it last. Easy PrintScreen ($15) from Microseconds International (Rancho Santa Fe, CA 619-756-0765) lets you capture screens by hitting the "Print Screen" key. Then print or save the screen in any of seven file formats.
It took only a few minutes to install. I started calling up images on my screen. First I visited www.bonington.com, Sir Christian Bonington's Internet diary of a mountain climbing expedition in Tibet. We wrote about this in June when the expedition started. In July they had reached the peak and were headed home.
I chose an image and clicked on "Print Scrn." The Easy PrintScreen menu popped up. A big preview window showed me the screen I captured. Buttons on the menu let me crop the image and alter brightness, sharpness and contrast. I could convert the image to grayscale. BMP, TIFF, TARGA, PCX, GIF, WPG and JPEG were options under "Save." I chose TIFF, because our art director Saul Roldan likes TIFF files. He wasn't able to open that file. I saved it again as a PCX file on a different disk. This worked fine.
Saul wasn't thrilled with the image because it was only 72 dpi resolution. I tried saving it as a bigger file so that he could shrink it down and make it look better, but the resolution remained 72 dpi.
If you want professional quality screen captures you'd better buy a more expensive program. If you want an easy, quick way to capture screens, this is a good program for you.
