Microsoft adds new screen recording capabilities to Sysinternals ZoomIt

Microsoft’s suite of Sysinternal tools is an interesting collection. While not as exciting – or as frequently updated – as PowerToys, it is home to a number of incredibly useful utilities, especially for power users and system administrators.

But there are also instances of crossover, and the screen recording tool ZoomIt is a perfect example. Although ZoomIt has been merged into the PowerToys utility suite, a standalone version remains available for Sysinternal fans who want to steer clear of PowerToys. In an interesting move, Microsoft has pushed an update to the standalone version of ZoomIt with new features which are not available in PowerToys.

For anyone unfamiliar with ZoomIt, here’s the description from the PowerToys version: “ZoomIt is a screen zoom, annotation, and recording tool for technical presentations and demos. You can also use ZoomIt to snip screenshots to the clipboard or to a file. ZoomIt runs unobtrusively in the tray and activates with customizable hotkeys to zoom in on an area of the screen, move around while zoomed, and draw on the zoomed image”.

It is here that Microsoft explains a little about the thinking behind having two seperetae versions of the tool:

ZoomIt is one of the Sysinternals utilities and its standalone version works on all versions of Windows. To provide the most flexibility, this standalone version will continue to be available from Sysinternals. For more information about using ZoomIt or to download a standalone version, see ZoomIt in the Sysinternals documentation.

Now the standalone ZoomIt has just been updated to version 9.20, and the changelog announces the following developments:

This update to ZoomIt, a screen magnification and annotation tool, can now save screen recordings as either MP4 or GIF.

This might seem like a minor change, but it is worth noting – in case you have never worked with ZoomIt – that there was previously only the option of saving recordings as MP4s. In adding GIF as a supported export format, ZoomIt has been made much more useful and flexible.

But while this is great news for users of the standalone version of ZoomIt, there is no indication of when the PowerToys version will gain the same capabilities. It highlights the problem of having more than one way of distributing the same software. Here we see a mismatch in features as one edition is more powerful thanks to faster updates.

We have seen how quickly the PowerToys development team works on its utilities, though. With this in mind, it may actually not be long at all before the GIF option lands in PowerToys’ version of ZoomIt. However, it is not guaranteed, and this is a shame.