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The print-screen options, like other screen grabs, depend on your screen
resolution and color depth. The print-screen options create a Windows bitmap
that reflects your video settings. Unless you export the capture to GIF or
JPG, the print-screen options should not create those kinds of bitmap.
Now, about GIF. GIF supports 256 colors (8-bit). If your screen displays
16-, 24-, or higher-bit color depth, there is some interpretation that needs
to happen for the screen capture to display as a GIF. Thus, what you see
on-screen might not be what you get. However, since GIF is a non-lossy
format, the screen capture should be sharp and represent the sharp divisions
between dialog boxes, windows, and backgrounds.
JPEG supports higher than 8-bit color. However, JPEG is a lossy format. As
such, there is some interpolation, fuzzyness, and the like, that results in
an image that displays the stark definitions of a screen capture less well
than a GIF (or BMP, for that matter).
With all that in mind, I suppose the answer lies somewhere between what your
display settings are and into what application you are pasting the screen
captures to convert them to GIF/JPEG. FWIW, I have had no such problems
capturing screens in Win 3.x, Win 9x, Win NT, and Win2k.
Cheers,
Sean
sean -at- quodata -dot- com
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dave George [SMTP:editor -at- 400times -dot- co -dot- uk]
> Sent: Tuesday, January 02, 2001 4:23 PM
> To: TECHWR-L
> Subject: RE: Cursors! Foiled again.
>
>
> Whilst we are on the subject of screen captures, does anyone know
> why alt-print screen followed by paste sometimes pastes as a "mirky"
> jpg, and other times as a clean gif?
>
> NT does it, W2K did it then stopped, and W98 didn't do it as far as I
> can recall.
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