Ashampoo Snap 10 screen capture review

Ashampoo Snap 10 is a screen capture program for Windows that enables you to capture screenshots and video on Windows devices.

I reviewed Ashampoo Snap 7 back in 2013; a lot has changed since then, and yesterday's release of Ashampoo Snap 10 was a good enough reason to revisit the program and write another view.

Ashampoo Snap 10 is a commercial program. Customers who run a previous version can upgrade for a discounted price, the retail price is $49.99. You may download a trial version of the program from the Ashampoo website to test the software for ten days before making a buying decision.

Ashampoo Snap 10 review

Installation of the program is straightforward. You may select the installation directory, and configure the program to start with Windows as well.

The program is compatible with any device running Windows 7 or a newer version of Microsoft's Windows operating system.

You interact with the program in several ways. There is the capture bar, displayed at the top right of the screen by default, keyboard shortcuts, and the system tray icon and menu that you may use for that.

You can disable the capture bar if you don't need it. It is displayed as a small line at the top which expands when you hover the mouse over it.

The capture options -- video and various screenshot options -- are listed as icons there then:

• Capture video.
• Capture scrolling window (freestyle, Firefox).
• Capture scrolling window (Chrome, Edge).
• Capture single window.
• Capture free rectangle region.
• Capture freestyle region.
• Capture fixed region.
• Capture menu.
• Capture multiple windows/objects.
• Timed capture.
• Capture text (OCR).

The next step depends on what you select. If you select to capture a scrolling window for instance, you select that window with a click in the next step. Freestyle captures on the other hand let you draw rectangles or entirely custom shapes on the screen to highlight the areas that you want captured.

You are taken to a configuration window when you select video capture. Ashampoo Snap supports several recording options when it comes to video capture:

• Single window.
• Desktop (all monitors).
• Primary monitor.
• Rectangular region.
• Fixed region.
• Webcam.

You may select available audio and video presets, or switch to custom configuration to select the desired codec, frames per second, and quality parameters manually instead.

Videos can be encoded on the fly during the capture process, or saved to disk first and encoded after the capture ends. The latter option is useful to improve performance of the process.

Screen captures are opened in a full screen editor by default. You may change that behavior in the preferences, for instance to save captures automatically to disk instead.

The editor looks quite messy on first launch, as icons are displayed on the left, top and right of the interface. These icons have no titles, and it may take a while to understand what they do.

The left and top icon bars are designed for image manipulation, the right bar for processing the image afterwards.

All options that you could possibly want are available. You may add arrows or text to the screenshot, rotate or zoom it, blur or erase parts of it, or highlight parts.

The processing options are equally extensive. You may save the capture to the local system, cloud, or Facebook or Twitter, share it, print it, turn it into a PDF document, or send it to another application among other options.

One feature that I'd like to see here is an option to customize what is displayed on the screen. If I don't use a particular feature, I'd like an option to hide it from the editor to improve the accessibility of the features that I do use.

Ashampoo 10 Settings

It is advised to go through the settings on first start to customize the program for your needs. Options that you find there include configuring the output format, name and directory, default action when a screenshot is captured, hotkeys, and capture specific preferences such as browser monitoring, and website URL recording.

The last option is a new feature of Ashampoo Snap 10. The program may add the URL of the website that you captured using it to the screen capture. This can be interested for reference purposes, but is easily disabled in the settings if you don't require that option.

Ashampoo Snap 10: what is new

Here is a list of what is new in Ashampoo Snap 10 compared to Snap 9:

• Create screenshots of 3D fullscreen games.
• Capture screenshots and videos in up to 4K resolution.
• Videos: cut and join videos, save videos as episodes, turn videos into animated gifs, and improved video watermarks.
• Improved text recognition support.
• Add origin (URL) to images, to metadata, or in emailed messages (Outlook only).
• Speed improvements.
• Edit window is moveable now, and can be minimized.
• Full DPI awareness, support for different DPI settings across monitors.
• New formatting options for numbered buttons.
• Highlight effect with image analysis.

Closing Words

Ashampoo Snap 10 is a powerful screen capture program for Windows. It supports all the features that you expect from a commercial program, and then some. One interesting feature is for instance the ability to capture the desktop of multi-monitor systems simultaneously, or the ability to add URLs to the capture in various ways.

An option to turn off the tutorial system would be nice as Snap 10 displays tutorial screens when you use a feature for the first time. These may be useful to inexperienced users, but if you have used a capture software before, you may not need them at all.

Is it worth the price? That depends entirely on your requirements. Free programs like Greenshot offer great functionality as well, but they are limited when it comes to some features such as recording video, editing images, or the capture methods that they support.

Now You: Which screen capture software do you use?

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