HAL-PC Magazine

For those of you frustrated by the limitations of pressing Print Screen to copy a full screen and Alt+Print Screen to copy just the active window and then pasting the capture into another program to print it, a specialized screen capture program is needed. A capture programs lets you copy anything from your screen, manipulate it, then print, save, or paste it. Capture Eze Pro is one of these programs.

The initial Capture Eze Pro screen does not have a menu bar. It appears two screens later after something is captured. Also the second screen does not have a help button, which is where I first wanted it, although all the other screens have it. The program installed easily. However, when I moved the mouse, the program made an annoying swishing sound, which I turned off. Many clicks are needed in help basics just to go through all the links needed to understand what their terms mean. Once the options are set up, which is fussy, the capture works easily. In about four seconds (other programs do it in a second), the capture window opens after you press Print Screen showing what was captured. You can adjust the image by dragging the handles of the image, by typing in new values or by clicking the end of the slider bar. A tabbed menu and icons with popup descriptions let you adjust just about everything

To simply copy and paste is not very intuitive. You have to first select “Capture and Auto Save,” then “Copy to Clipboard without Saving,” then select what to copy (region), and finally activate. Then you still have to press Print Screen (or another hotbutton of your choice) to do the actual capture. To change what you want to capture (region vs. full screen) you have to go through all those settings again. On the main screen you can double click a menu choice, but on subsequent screens you have to click Next to move on. In other programs, you can create and save profiles of what you want and switch among them with a single click.

If you are somewhat new to computers and particularly graphics programs, setting this up to do what you want will be a challenge. The FAQs on their web site are more helpful than their help.

If you want to capture a menu in the pulled down (open) state you have to set “delay and repeat options,” activate the capture, press Print Screen, then open your menu and wait for the delay (maybe five seconds) to get the capture. With SnagIt you just capture it and bingo it shows up.

Where Capture Eze Pro says it shines is in capturing images and printing them. Creating an album of travel photos using the “Work with Existing Images” is easy, although many digital cameras already come with software that does this. Once your pictures are loaded, you can adjust each one separately. However, it seems that you can only have one page per file in the album. Other software is more flexible for working with existing pictures, like the free IrfanView and it will give you a slide show to boot. You can print “image catalogs” which seems to be nothing more than thumbnails of your pictures with captions on them. You can easily print thumbnails directly from XP, camera software, and IrfanView.

For a Pro version, this does not seem to have the flexibility needed for full control of the image. For a beginner the screens are tricky to set up and the terminology confusing until you read the cumbersome screens of help. Other free programs exist to do what most folks want to do with screen capturing. To check Capture Eze Pro out for yourself with a free trial before spending $39.95, go to

www.screencapture.com/ezepro.htm.

Mel Babb, a long time HAL-PC member is a one-on-one computer tutor who types up step-by-step notes for her clients and she can be reached at melbabb@earthlink.net.