The TeleCampus Course Development Team at the University of Texas recently completed a side-by-side comparison of the major screencasting tools. Look across the top of the page for the links to demos of Captivate, ViewletBuilder/ViewletCam, and Camtasia. Last "tab" is a comparison, which I found a little confusing. There are numbers running down the left side that don't have a key. At first I thought they were the number of products that could do X in the grid, but that didn't seem to match up. The MS Word version is a little easier to read. While I only skimmed the grid, I noticed some of the information to be suspect (for instance, they indicate ViewletBuilder isn't available for the Mac - oh wait, the Mac version appears to have been pulled from the Qarbon site!). Ok, the only other thing I noticed then was that their prices seemed a little high - I don't think the prices on their grid represent educational discounts for Camtasia or ViewletBuilder. They also don't tell us specifically which versions of the software they were using (Camtasia recently released a new version, for instance). I found it ironic that the Macromedia product seemed to do the worst job of capturing a flash file!
Thanks to Karen in Winnipeg for the link.
