DuckCapture

We love screen-capture utilities, perhaps because they can be both incredibly useful and a lot of fun. DuckCapture promised to be one of the better ones we've tried, and we were especially excited about checking out its autoscroll feature. Unfortunately, DuckCapture wasn't all we had hoped. It works well for the most part; but for us, it had one fatal flaw.

The program has a straightforward interface, with icons that users can click to select the region, window, full screen, or scrolling page that they want to capture. The scrolling feature is especially cool; click on a long Web page that you want to capture, and DuckCapture will automatically scroll down and capture the entire thing. Once the capture is done, users can annotate it, copy it to the clipboard, print it, or even share it on Minus, a file-sharing Web site. Ostensibly, users can also save their captures as images, but that's where we ran into problems. Try as we might, we could not successfully save any of our screen captures. We tried saving them as different file types and in different locations, but when we went to open them, they weren't there. A search of our machine indicated that we hadn't inadvertently saved them to some obscure directory; they had just vanished. This is obviously a major problem for a screen-capture utility, and one that we're at a loss to explain. The program has no Help file to speak of, so we weren't able to take any troubleshooting steps. There are workarounds--we were able to upload our captures to Minus and then save them to our computer--but that's obviously not how we'd prefer to do things. Overall, we think that DuckCapture has a lot of potential, but we'll probably stick to other utilities that reliably work for us.

DuckCapture installs and uninstalls without issues. We recommend this program with reservations.