Epiphan's FrameGrabber Can Take Screenshots of Your Dumb TV

It does not take rocket science to grab an average screenshot of your desktop workspace. Screenshots come in handy when you have to snatch a photo on a copy-reluctant website or to surprise a funny/not so funny/idiotic status message in your messenger contact list. Of course, you can put screenshots to much serious use, but sometimes taking them is merely impossible.

Using Alt+PrintScreen or your favorite snapshot application is not always possible. What if you use a non-PC computing system, or worse: a simple terminal or proprietary hardware systems? Of course, you always can take your digital camera and teach the screen a lesson, but if you're a CRT user, you will have the surprise to encounter some raster lines along your picture.

Before you give up, you'd rather check Epiphan's VGA2USB External Frame Grabber hardware appliance. It is supposed to work with any signal source that streams via a VGA or DVI interface. The FrameGrabber comes in six different versions, depending on the hardware specifications. For instance, the top offering, the VGA 2 USB FrameGrabber can snapshot frames at resolutions of up to 2048x2048. More than that, it will capture video at 2048x2048, in 24-bit, at 30 FPS, with lossless compression, to keep the image quality unaffected.

The VGA2USB PRO FrameGrabber comes with 32 MB of onboard storage, and is packed with FPGA and Philips VGA technologies, that allow the device to acquire frames at high resolutions. There is a major drawback, though, as the device don't pass the VGA and DVI signals back to the initial display, so you need to use a secondary DVI/VGA output if you want to watch the transmission while you are recording it.

The devices are available immediately, but they come with quite a price tag. While the lowest-end model costs $300, the highest-end offering will let you short of $2000.