Tokyo-based software development organisation Birds Systems Research Institute has developed a program that it claims is able to read complex Japanese printed characters: running on a NEC Corp PC-9800 personal computer with an external expansion board and a scanner board, the system can scan five characters per second with over 99% percent precision, using a scanner from NEC or Sharp Corp; the software costs $4,500 – against $15,000 for the last generation of Japanese character recognition software – and Birds is hoping to sell 6,000 copies of the package in year one.
