Best Free Screen Capture Utility

Three recommendations here: The first is PrintScreen [1]. It’s a prime example of the KISS principle. It does exactly what I want, in the way I want while avoiding the trap of providing lots of useless and confusing features. It’s the little things that count like making the hot key PrtSc so I don’t have to remember it, and automatically sequentially naming the output files for multiple screen shots.

A second recommendation is Screen Hunter [2]. It’s a commercial product but the “lite” free version is excellent, offering more features than Gadwin at the cost of a little added complexity. It can save in .jpg, .bmp or .gif formats.

Also highly recommended is FastStone’s Screen Capture [3] It doesn’t require installation and yet has more features than you could ever want including the ability to capture scrolling screen shots across more than one screen page. It can also save in BMP, JPEG, JPEG2000, PNG, GIF, TIFF and TGA formats. In many ways it’s like the full commercial
version of ScreenHunter except that it’s free for personal use. NOTE: Since version 5.4 Screencapture has become commercial shareware. You can however get the last free version from here [4]

All three products work with Win 98 and later versions.

[1] http://www.gadwin.com/printscreen/?prnscr (2.7MB)
[2] http://www.wisdom-soft.com/products/screenhunter.htm (2.6MB)
[3] http://www.faststone.org/FSCaptureDetail.htm (1.4MB)
[4] http://www.aplusfreeware.com/categories/mmedia/FastStoneCapture.html

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