7 Capture

On the standard Windows operating system, pressing the Print-Screen key will copy an image of the entire screen to the clipboard, holding the Alt key and pressing the Print-Screen key will capture the currently selected window. Vista and Windows 7 come with a screen capture utility pre-installed. Other operating systems may also offer a similar utility for screen capture.

As an alternative to the utilities that come with the OS, the freeware products in this review cover most of the following useful features and functions which users might find they need:

• Capture full screen or freely selected screen areas
• Auto detect windows and control objects such as button, box, toolbar, tab, etc
• Snap scrolling windows, allow delayed captures
• Re-size screen shots or create thumbnails and other extra features.

This article's focus is on screen captures. If your priority is editing, after the capture, then check out Best Free Digital Image Editor. Several of the editors listed also perform screen captures.

I've eliminated many products because they can't adapt to my screen settings, eg I have the custom text size set to 150%.  I feel that I should not have to optimize the screen settings for the screen capture tool.  Instead, I should optimize the screen for myself and the item I want to capture. The utility should be able to adapt. As evidence that this is not impossible there are several utilities listed below which meet this criteria.