Not even the biggest PC monitor is a match for SnagIt's "auto-scroll" capture option, which saves the active window — even the longest or widest web page — as a single image, with a little hourglass cursor letting you follow along as the utility scrolls down or across (or both) before saving the finished image (for example, a 1,006 by 5,312-pixel view of a complete web page).
And your daughter's school report? A "Web Capture" option automatically grabs every image on a web page, as if you'd painstakingly right-clicked each one — or, if you really want to fill your hard disk in a hurry, creates multiple folders to store all the images on linked pages as well. (For sanity's sake, you can also specify file-size and disk-space maximums.) You can even tell SnagIt to capture multiple screens — with frame rates at anywhere from 2 to 30 frames per second — and save them as an AVI animated movie for simple tutorials or demonstrations of menus, dialog boxes, or other software functions.
Perhaps the handiest additions of recent releases (versions 6.x and 7.x) are the OneClick utility and the add-in toolbars for the Internet Explorer and Office's Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint. The OneClick tool is designed for speed and convenience, residing hidden on your desktop until you need it for a quick screen capture, while the toolbar add-ins let you set up and perform a screen capture from within the application, without switching to the SnagIt control panel, and automatically insert the resulting image as a new slide in your PowerPoint presentation or graphic (or link to one) in your Word document.
Other new additions in SnagIt 7 include the efficient and easy to use SnagIt Image Editor, output options for Instant Messages (IMs), new and improved web capture capabilities, import/export profiles, improved automatic file naming, new image effects such as 3D perspective/shear and spotlight/magnify effects, a profile management interface, and a join feature that cuts out any unwanted sections and then automatically connects the rest of the image.
While SnagIt's main cropping and touch-up tools and catalog (thumbnail viewer) are all that many users will need, the SnagIt Studio application offers a rather geeky — complex dialog boxes, non-intuitive menus, options for handling things like line width or color — but capable set of drawing and decorating tools for adding annotations, arrows, icons, or notes to your captures or other images.
Fortunately, users also have the option of using the basic but more user-friendly SnagIt Image Editor. Even better, version 7.1 adds an option for directing screen captures to the external program of your choice, allowing you to quick send captures to the likes of Paint Shop Pro or Adobe Photoshop.
Again, all this artistic power is $40 worth of overkill for casual users, but anyone who regularly needs to save anything that appears on the PC screen — and use it in worker training, software debugging, or just as the perfect illustration for a report or other document — will come to rely on SnagIt's sharp eyes. There's a bit of a learning curve between its beginner's wizard and its options-and-properties menus, but it's a rewarding example of a utility time-saver.
Pros: Tons of useful features, easy to use, numerous add-ins for working with other programs, integrated image editor, attractive interface
Cons: Relatively expensive; features and capabilities are overkill for most casual users, for whom the PrtScr key will suffice in almost all cases
