Is there a way to take a screenshot using Java and save it to some sort of image?

Believe it or not, you can actually use java.awt.Robot to "create an image containing pixels read from the screen." You can then write that image to a file on disk.

I just tried it, and the whole thing ends up like:

Rectangle screenRect = new Rectangle(Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getScreenSize());
BufferedImage capture = new Robot().createScreenCapture(screenRect);
ImageIO.write(capture, "bmp", new File(args[0]));

NOTE: This will only capture the primary monitor. See GraphicsConfiguration for multi-monitor support.

If you'd like to capture all monitors, you can use the following code:

GraphicsEnvironment ge = GraphicsEnvironment.getLocalGraphicsEnvironment();
GraphicsDevice[] screens = ge.getScreenDevices();

Rectangle allScreenBounds = new Rectangle();
for (GraphicsDevice screen : screens) {
    Rectangle screenBounds = screen.getDefaultConfiguration().getBounds();

    allScreenBounds.width += screenBounds.width;
    allScreenBounds.height = Math.max(allScreenBounds.height, screenBounds.height);
}

Robot robot = new Robot();
BufferedImage screenShot = robot.createScreenCapture(allScreenBounds);

I never liked using Robot, so I made my own simple method for making screenshots of JFrame objects:

public static final void makeScreenshot(JFrame argFrame) {
    Rectangle rec = argFrame.getBounds();
    BufferedImage bufferedImage = new BufferedImage(rec.width, rec.height, BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_ARGB);
    argFrame.paint(bufferedImage.getGraphics());

    try {
        // Create temp file
        File temp = File.createTempFile("screenshot", ".png");

        // Use the ImageIO API to write the bufferedImage to a temporary file
        ImageIO.write(bufferedImage, "png", temp);

        // Delete temp file when program exits
        temp.deleteOnExit();
    } catch (IOException ioe) {
        ioe.printStackTrace();
    }
}