Bad OCR

I had high hopes for this app. I wanted something that would read Japanese text using my iPad camera. Unfortunately, when I tested it on an English-language newspaper (not having any Japanese text around), I discovered that the OCR is very poor, producing lots (maybe 30%) of gibberish. This was using the iPad camera, and getting about as close to the text as the camera would focus (the developers site suggests that people who have problems with OCR in this app are shooting the text from too far away). As a comparison, I took pictures of the same text using another (cheaper, if not free) translator, and the OCR worked perfectly. I repeated this experiment with several text samples and always got the same results. Now, I dont know how this app works for Japanese text, but if its anything like how it works for Latin-based letters, its worthless.

It does have two good points: the user interface is nice, and the translations seem to work well (I had it translate into Spanish, a language I know). But thats very small comfort, since the OCR on which the translations are based basically doesnt work. If theyd fix the OCR, this would be a good app.

El Cajon about Babelshot: Translate Instantly Using Phone Camera, v1.3