Bandisoft has unveiled Honeycam, a versatile animated GIF creator for Windows available in both a commercial ($26) and a limited free version.

The program includes an easy-to-use screen recorder. Place a rectangle around the area you’d like to record – like a video player – and you can capture up to 10 seconds of activity with the free build, 30 for the full version.

Honeycam is also able to build animations from a series of still images, or you can open an existing animated GIF/ WebP file directly.

The editor is Honeycam’s strong point. There are tools to adjust the brightness and contrast of individual frames, apply special effects, crop or resize them, add images or text watermarks, set transitions or adjust animation speeds.

The editor is packed with useful features, including the ability to add transitions between frames

These have far more power than we expected, too. Add a caption, say, and you can enter your text, set its position, font, style, colour, add a drop shadow, even define a custom drop shadow colour.

There are also various fine-tuning options, including the ability to delete selected frames, copy or move them around, reverse playback or set individual frame delays. And if the file is too large – a common problem with GIFs – a “Reduce” option deletes either all the even or the odd frames, cutting it down to size while preserving the original speed.

Once you’ve finished, the animation can be exported as a GIF, WebP or WebM file. The free build adds a watermark, but it’s relatively unobtrusive.

If you’re happy with free tools like Screen to Gif or Cyotek Gif Animator then Honeycam’s $26 is going to seem very expensive. But it does have a great feature set, particularly the editor, WebP and WebM support. If you can live with the free build’s watermark and 10 second recording limit, give it a try.