Simplosys Solutions Blog

ScreenHunter 5.0 is a free Snag-IT replacement screen capture software. You can download it here - Screen Capture Software.

Here's my review about it. The product is a great tool for simple screen capture. If you are looking for Area/Window to JPG/GIF screen capture, this tool will do it for you. And it's stable, never once crashed on me. The interface is very easy to use and the screen capture works every single time. It works like a charm on XP Home, XP Pro, Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate. I am sure it works on other OS too, though I haven't tried it.

Often, when we look at a new software product, the hardest part is to figure out what it does NOT do. Obviously, the product owner/seller does not talk about the deficiencies of the product in detail and online reviews are often not detailed enough to get a real picture. So, here you go - the cons:

1. It automatically saves the captured image to the selected folder. You are able to select the folder where it places the image, but I was not able to get it to pop up a window where I could fill out the file name and the location to place the file. That's a pretty basic feature that any screen capturing software should have in my opinion.

2. There is no option to "bring to the top" or "make this the active window". If you think about it, screen capture prorams are always going to be at the top before you hit "Capture" and then they disappear to allow you to capture the screen that you are interested in. Screen Hunter tends to disappear behind other windows and it often gets difficult to make it available when you need it. I figured some quirky workarounds to make it work, but I wish it worked like the way SnagIt does in this regard.

3. There are no bells and whistles. No scrolling window capture. No features to edit the image after capture or make any annotations on it. You are going to have work with other tools for that. That's fine, just that you should know that going in to avoid any disappointment. If you are like me and using SnagIT for a while, then you are spoiled and might expect all those features.

Overall, I rate the product 3.5 out of 5. It does most of the things it says it would and does them well. If #1 and #2 above are resolved, I'd give it 4 at least. SnagIT is a much better product overall with a MUCH larger feature set. This is like a baby version of SnagIT if you want to do simple screen capture and don't want to pay TechSmith for all that bloat in SnagIT that you don't need.