There are many screen-capture utilities, but not all are created equal and some do little more than PrtScr. For many years I've used Techsmith's Snagit.

Earlier versions of Snagit had a three-tab panel interface that organised grabbing into Capture, Edit and Organize. I only ever made use of Capture, as the other features are better catered for by other applications. However, in the new version 9 of Snagit, the editing and organising functions have been hived off to a separate Editor application.

Snagit allows you to define capture profiles and includes some useful presets, such as Full screen capture, Window capture and Object capture. The preset profiles make a good starting point for creating your own. The default hotkey is PrtScr, but this can be changed in the preferences. There are four capture modes:

Image, Text, Video and Web. Image is the one I use most often and produces a conventional screengrab. I've found the video capabilities of Snagit too limited and the quality of the results insufficient for producing video tutorials, but for a short clip lasting a few seconds, it's usable.

There's also a text option that captures readable text (not a bitmap) from the screen. This is particularly useful if you want to copy text that can't ordinarily be selected, such as your recent documents list, the contents of a menu or an inscrutable error message. The final option, Web, trawls a web page, copies all graphic files and saves them to a folder.

Snagit's Input menu defines exactly what you want to grab and includes but extends far beyond - the whole screen and active window options of PrtScr. You can define a region with a rectangular marquee, set a fixed region (useful for recording one screen of a dual-screen setup), capture menus and other objects, and define an irregular screen region with a lasso tool. Scrolling options allow you to capture the entire contents of a scrollable window so you can, for example, create a very long or wide screen grab of a spreadsheet or a long web page.

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There are multiple output options; among other things, you can open the grabbed image in your image editor, print it directly, attach it to an email or FTP it. The most useful option and the one I use almost exclusively is to save it to a file. In this case, you can choose a filename or have Snagit automatically apply sequentially numbered ones - for example, Step 1, Step 2 and so on. You can also apply all kinds of effects to the captured screen image, including edge effects and watermarks. More usefully, you can downsample the capture, reduce the colour depth or automatically trim screengrabs. Being able to perform these operations automatically during capture saves both time and effort.

Options buttons allow you to toggle settings such as displaying the cursor, capture preview and multiple capture. This last one is useful for capturing, for example, a menu bar complete with selected menu and sub-menu, and is the kind of thing that would take an age using PrtScr.

One of the problems I always used to have with screengrabs was capturing tooltip windows and other elements that have a tendency to disappear when you press a key. Snagit allows you to incorporate a predefined delay so you can avoid this, and it will even display a countdown so you can get everything set up in good time.
Delayed capture is also useful for capturing processes such as scripts that would be interrupted by keyboard input. You can also use this feature to perform scheduled captures.