I downloaded it immediately. Making it free to try and selling the dictionaries is a great sales model. The demo mode does a mirror-image reversal of the word to show you that it can detect words.
I was using a 4th gen iPod Touch, so lower-res camera and no flash.
Unfortunately, I was not able to get it to work as well as I'd hoped. I tested physical copies of a few things:
1. Mac OS X Snow Leopard cd case. Black sans-serif text on white background. This worked the best, with the word-reversal consistently getting "Snow" and "Leopard" reversed with little flicker. "Mac" seemed to go in and out. OS was rarely replaced, and usually along with "Mac" as though it were part of the same word.
2. C++ Programming language book cover (http://pixhost.info/pictures/631454). Dark blue serif text on white. This almost never worked. When it did recognize letters, the recognition shifted so much that the word was a constantly moving jumble.
3. Throat Coat tea bag. White serif text on Red. At any point in time, about 50% of the words were recognized and reversed.
You can take a snapshot, and each word it recognizes is highlighted, which is pretty cool.
I would definitely buy something like this that handled non-romance languages to English.
The current iPod touch has only a very low res, low quality camera (I think VGA or maybe a bit better, in any case less than 1 MP) without even autofocus. It would be nice if someone could try it with an iPhone to see if it fares better.
For me it seemed to work better in the translation mode. The reversing mode flickered forth and back, but with English-to-Spanish seemed to be more stable.
I was using a 4th gen iPod Touch, so lower-res camera and no flash.
Unfortunately, I was not able to get it to work as well as I'd hoped. I tested physical copies of a few things:
1. Mac OS X Snow Leopard cd case. Black sans-serif text on white background. This worked the best, with the word-reversal consistently getting "Snow" and "Leopard" reversed with little flicker. "Mac" seemed to go in and out. OS was rarely replaced, and usually along with "Mac" as though it were part of the same word.
2. C++ Programming language book cover (http://pixhost.info/pictures/631454). Dark blue serif text on white. This almost never worked. When it did recognize letters, the recognition shifted so much that the word was a constantly moving jumble.
3. Throat Coat tea bag. White serif text on Red. At any point in time, about 50% of the words were recognized and reversed.
You can take a snapshot, and each word it recognizes is highlighted, which is pretty cool.
I would definitely buy something like this that handled non-romance languages to English.