techsmith.com ■ Retail Price: $49.95 for one license; $24.95 upgrade. Volume pricing available
Snagit 2018 is an exciting upgrade to TechSmith’s flagship screen capture, recording, and image editing application. Snagit 2018’s new features of interest to educational users include built-in Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which enables users to edit or extract text from images, and Smart Move options that identify and define objects within a capture for repositioning or removal.
Quality and Effectiveness: Snagit 2018 offers much more than rudimentary capture. Users can easily modify captures with attention-grabbing arrows, buttons, numbers, speech bubbles, framed borders, and more. Special editing tools also make it easy to tag, resize, trim, flip, or rotate an image, change the canvas color, or apply special effects. In addition to OCR and Smart Move, Snagit 2018 also creates videos of screen movements and webcam captures for output as MP4 movies.
Ease of Use: The program is easy to install, and it’s also simple to personalize default settings. The Snagit website offers easy-to-follow tutorials, how-to videos, and operational tips.
Creative Use of Technology: Snagit 2018 offers many flexible capture settings and special tools to improve the appearance of static screen or video captures. Two tools—Grab Text and Smart Move—are new to this version. Grab Text enables users to extract text from a capture for pasting in another application such as Google Docs or Microsoft Word. This feature comes in handy for using text in an assignment, sharing the text of an error message, extracting text from a Flash-based webpage, and more. Smart Move enables users to find and move, copy, or delete objects or text in a captured image. Snagit 2018 retains favorite features from previous versions, like Panoramic Scrolling Capture and Time Delay. Users can record screen videos with or without the cursor, system audio, voiced narration, or the computer’s built-in webcam. After the captured video opens, users can trim away unwanted portions or create animated GIFs. Sharing options enable users to save, send, or share captures directly to a printer, PDF, YouTube, Google Drive, email, Dropbox, or FTP. Windows users can download additional sharing profiles preconfigured to send an image or video capture directly to third-party websites and applications such as Facebook, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Twitter.
Suitability for Use in a School Environment: Snagit 2018 gives users more control over captured images and recorded screen video and also offers sophisticated editing tools, special effects, and stamps. Stamp collections such as Algebra, Charts and Graphs, Emojis, Geometry, Map, and Math are available primarily for Windows (with some for Macintosh). The Snagit Toolbar can also be customized and the TechSmith also offers a host of tip-rich blogs.
OVERALL RATING:
Snagit 2018 gives users creative control over their captures. Features such as Grab Text, Smart Move, scrolling capture, special stamps, and video screencasting make this software well worth its purchase price.
TOP FEATURES
• Built-in OCR allows users to extract text from a captured screen for use in other applications.
• Pre-configured capture-sharing profiles simplify output directly to third-party applications.
• Robust editing tools make it easy to personalize images.
