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Most screen capture programs do the same thing: they allow you to grab a copy of the screen or an active window and either save it to the clipboard or print it on the printer.  Some will let you save it to disk in one or more formats — the more the better.  Some will let you edit it by adding annotations and call-outs.  But one of the most useful ones will let you select a specific region to capture.

Most of the time when I use screen capture programs, I rarely need to capture the entire screen.  Actually, it’s a problem, because the monitors I use are relatively large: one is 1280×1024 and the other is 1600×1260.  A full-screen capture will produce an image that will be larger than most people can view. 

As a rule-of-thumb, the most common screen size today is 1024×768.  That’s the largest screen size you should expect your viewers to have.

Also, I find that capturing the currently active window isn’t terribly useful either.  For one thing, it’s very common to capture images from the web that are displayed in my browser.  I’ve got a bunch of menus included in my browser that take up 15% or more of the top of the browser window.  Including them in my screen captures creates a distraction.

You really want to capture exactly the material you’re focusing on in your discussion, whether it’s written, audio, or visual.  In these cases, you need a feature that lets you select arbitrary portions of your screen.  They’re typically going to be rectangular in shape.  But they could be square, circular, oval, trapezoidal, or completely irregular.

The point is, Windows itself will let you get a screen capture of the entire screen and the active window, but you usually are going to want far less.  Not all tools can do this, believe it or not.  So before you buy one, read the specs carefully and find one that can grab pieces the way you think you’re going to need them captured.

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