The Nintendo Switch may have a dedicated Capture button (for screenshots) on the left Joy-Con and on the Pro Controller, but you don’t really hear many people talking about it. It wasn’t until last week that Nintendo really did anything beyond its announcement to promote the feature. Now that I’ve gotten my hands on the Switch and have had ample time to test it out, I’ve realised that the capture feature is the best thing about the Switch.
Coming from a PS Vita and PS4, I expect a few things from a screenshot feature: it needs to be quick and there needs to be an easy way to export the screenshots for whatever I need them for.
The PS Vita does this pretty well. Taking a screenshot is as simple as pressing the PlayStation and start buttons at the same time. A camera shutter and flash of the screen indicates that the screenshot was successfully taken. You’ll need to wait a few seconds before you take another, though. That’s important here. Exporting the screenshot can be done by posting it to Twitter or going through the content manager app to send the file to your PC. With some slight configuration, it’s easy and mostly painless.
The PS4’s process isn’t as quick. While the PS4 has a dedicated screenshot button in the form of the “Share Button,” it takes a few seconds for the screenshot to be taken. This means that if you’re trying to catch a quick action right as it happens, well that’s just not possible.
You could work around this by exporting a video of the event and using Sony Vegas, Premiere Pro, or some other application to screenshot that moment, but that’s way too complicated. Exporting the screenshot, thankfully, is so much easier. Just upload to Facebook or Twitter, or save it to an external storage device. Super simple.
And then there’s the Nintendo Switch, which is the fastest at taking screenshots. Hit the Capture button on your Joy-Con or Pro Controller, a notification tells you the screenshot was taken and you’re done. However, it gets much better: there’s no delay between screenshots. This means that if you want to take ten screenshots in a row and hand stitch your very own GIF together, you sure as hell can do that. I don’t know why you’d want to, but you can!
I was floored when I first discovered how easy all of this was. If you’d have told me that Nintendo of all companies would be the one to have the best and most straightforward screenshot feature, I would’ve scoffed. This makes reviews or even Facebook and Twitter posts a whole lot easier. That said, there’s a small caveat: exporting kinda sucks.
To get those screenshots off your device, you’ll need to send them to the microSD card in your system or post them to Twitter or Facebook. On the plus side, you can adorn your picture with some flashy text, but I’d prefer external hard drive support.
Nintendo has plans to add more features to the Capture button, like the ability to record gameplay, in the future. Hopefully, this deviation from the simplicity of the button’s current feature set doesn’t slow down its responsiveness.
