Quality with the screenshot tool isn't good

Question

Whenever I take screenshots using the default screenshot tool on my Ubuntu 11.10 (unity), the image does not look as good as the screen itself (the quality is deteriorated). So I would like to take high quality screenshots. Is there any tool for this?
[The resolution of the image is the same as that of my screen, but surprisingly, it does not look as good as the original one.]

Answer 1

Shutter

My suggestion would be to use a screen capture tool such as Shutter.

If you look in the preferences - you can define what the compression ratio is together with the graphical format.

Answer 2

If you don't want to install yet another program give Gimp a try. File->Acquire->Screen Shot...

Answer 3

How are you viewing the resulting image?

The default tool gnome-screenshot does take sharp images but if you open them in the default Image Viewer and knock the mouse scrollwheel (or the Best Fit option is in effect) then the quality degrades significantly. In Image Viewer press Ctrl+0 (zero) to revert to Normal view (100% scale).

Answer 4

The images are fine, but they look blurry because the default Gnome Image viewer is set to "Best Fit" instead of "Normal view", which resizes images slightly, making them appear blurry. Unfortunately, there seems to be no preference or setting that allows changing this. Instead just install another image viewing app, and make it the default:
sudo aptitude install gthumb
It can be customized to view images 1:1 by going Edit -> Preferences -> Viewer -> Set to actual size. Then go View -> unselect "Thumbnail pane" (with this on, it seems to interfere with 1:1 viewing). Test it, then if so make it the default app by going ubuntu "System Settings" (top right corner of your desktop) -> System info -> Default applications -> Photos -> gThumb.