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Didn't see anything about this so thought i'd drop a mention.
Picked one up as a replacement for my old original Japanese import DS.
Comes pre-loaded with a 6 in 1 dictionary which has Japanese as an option.
Great your saying.. so do many things.
but....
you can take pictures with the camera and dictionary will scan the image and tell you what it says.
So if you see a row of kanji you can't read. Steady your arm, take a pic and let the dictionary work its magic. Have tested it on a few things, works pretty well. You do need to take a non blurry clear image however.
I'm mostly using it to play copius amounts of Worms open warfare 2.. but its nice it has this feature built in.
This is a European model. The dictionary, if not pre-loaded on Asian and USA models should be available in the shop.
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I have the Japanese DSi LL and it came with a dictionary pre-loaded. I didn't spend much time looking at it, and I didn't know about the picture thing. I'm going to have to try that.
You just take a picture from the main menu, or do you have to be in the dictionary app first?
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the option is in the dictionary itself, you can hand write the kanji or you can take a picture with the camera. quite a useful little tool I think. Although I have only tested it on things I have lying around here, so nothing overly complicated. Don't know how comprehensive the dictionary is.
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Wow that's sweet. Can you single out a word if you take a snapshot of a sentence or block of text?
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My old cellphone had this functionality but it was useless since it couldn't figure out where one word ended and the next began. The only way to get it to recognize anything was to cover up all of the surrounding text. The definitions were rather poor too.
I wonder what dictionary DSiXL uses...
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I have a different dictionary I downloaded from the online store.
It's monolingual, has bookmarks, and has quizzes. It's nice but I only understand 10-20% of the definitions!
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But that's like 4 screens and possible 4 cameras.
That's a bit overkill.
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I don't see a way to activate the camera in the Japanese version. Maybe you could explain how it's done in the XL?
Edit: Nevermind. On the LL, the built-in dictionary doesn't have it. I found one on the store that says it has a camera function, so I'm buying that to try it.
Edited: 2010-03-23, 2:25 pm
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Okay, I tried it on some Japanese books.
Problems:
It wants the text -really- big. If it's not big enough, it won't even -try- to process it. (It makes you draw a rectangle around the text, and if the rectangle isn't big enough, you can't finish.) That means getting closer to the book than the camera will focus on. So everything's blurry.
Everything's blurry. Even when it's further away, it's still blurry because it's a crappy camera. If the lines are thick enough or the kanji simple enough, it's pretty much perfect. If not, it's really iffy.
It's meant for horizontal text. You can do vertical text with it, and it'll work... But the screen is oriented the other way and there's even text at the top of the screen that's in the way of drawing the rectangle vertically.
Still, it's a multilingual dictionary (japanese, english, french, german, etc etc) and works really well, so the 500 yen was well spent.
