Screen AVI CAM for Windows

Screen AVI CAM takes the humble screenshot to new levels by letting you capture an interactive, on-screen video. It's a little demanding and sometimes glitchy, but users who want to do a step-by-step tutorial will like it a lot.

This program comes with a 30-day trial while the full version costs $29 to unlock. When you're using the trial, it drops a screenshot on the final video. When testing, the program had to run at a reduced resolution and at Windows' basic color scheme. When it didn't, it caused the program to leave weird, white traces along the screen. Screen AVI CAM drops an interactive cursor over your screen so you always see what it's recording. You can resize the cursor as much as you like and activate recording with customizable keyboard shortcuts. This program offers many additional features such as sound and visual effects on mouse clicks, drawing mode, etc. When you're in the mouse mode you can choose fixed area or mouse tracking, for instance, which is excellent for users who wish to create video tutorials. The program auto-saves video files to AVI, which makes them easy to play or convert on any media player. However, the program doesn't come with any onboard editing features. Most of your tinkering has to be done while you're shooting.

It's definitely not the cleanest or most intuitive program, but it offers a very powerful feature set. Once you get over the early hurdles Screen AVI CAM throws at you, it becomes a lot of fun. $30 isn't cheap, but if you've been looking for a program to record your entire screen, it could be worth the investment.

Editors' note: This is a review of the trial version of Screen AVI CAM 4.0.