Take Effective Screenshots with ACA Capture Pro

In the interests of full disclosure, this is a paid review, ordered by ACA Capture Pro. But even though the company has paid for the review, my views are still my own and I am allowed to be negative if I want! You can rest assured that the following opinions are really what I think!

Screen capture software has a lot of rivals to contend with as the market starts to heat up. As well as all the free options available (which we’ll get into later), there are also paid options, one prime example being ACA Capture PRO, screen capture software from ACA Systems.

I was given a trial version of ACA Capture Pro to give it a workout and see what I thought. My initial impression is that it is easy to use and it produces good quality pictures, but one drawback immediately became apparent – it has right-click menu integration with Internet Explorer but not with Mozilla Firefox or Opera. Since I am a Firefox user 99% of the time and Opera the other 1% of the time, ignoring these two browsers doesn’t make a lot of sense to me from a business perspective seeing as how Firefox is slowly starting to dominate the browser market and how Internet Explorer leaves a really bad taste in some peoples mouths. Hopefully the company is working on Firefox and Opera right-click menu integration.

So today I broke the habit of a lifetime by actually using Internet Explorer! Man, I’m getting the shakes here!

The first thing to notice after installing the software is that ACA Capture Pro places some options in your Internet Explorer right-click mouse menu. The first one is fairly self-explanatory – it captures all the Flash on a page.

The second one is quite interesting though and I haven’t seen this on any other screen capture software. Basically “Capture all images” quickly grabs all the pictures from a webpage and puts them on your computer. This is very useful if you have a page full of graphics – instead of tediously right-clicking and saving each individual picture, this option can grab all the pictures with one mouse-click. Extremely useful.

The third one is the option to make a screenshot of the entire page and you can choose whether you want the browser to appear in the picture or have the IE elements removed. As you can also see from the screenshot, you can also export the image to Microsoft Excel but you also have the opportunity to export images to Word and Powerpoint (if you have them installed on your computer obviously).

The company recommends that you use a Hotkey to capture images instead of right-clicking with the mouse, and keyboard shortcut enthusiasts will like this one. To do a screenshot, the Hotkey is CTRL + F2. This then starts a cursor which you drag across the screen to capture the part you want and you can then save it to the computer.

One feature I particularly liked was that when I hit the “print screen” key on the keyboard, ACA Capture Pro immediately took a screenshot of the webpage and automatically inserted it into an email as an attachment. But here, the bias towards Microsoft becomes even more evident as it overrode my default email client (web-based Gmail) and instead opened my girlfriend’s Outlook Express.

There’s so much to ACA Capture Pro that it would be impossible to cover it all here, so the best course of action would be to download the free trial version and give it a go yourself. But if you click here, you will see a screenshot of the MakeUseOf page that I took with ACA Capture Pro so you can judge for yourself how good it is.

Now I know there are lots of users out there who don’t like paid software (I met a few when I was promoting the virtues of SnagIt) and so to balance things out (plus to provide some comparison), here are some free basic alternatives :

1. Gadwin PrintScreen – scroll down for the free version.

2. MW Snap.

3. Screenshot Captor