Originally Posted by RVN84

right, in terms of software it should be fine, but what about the camera?

It should work, I tried that app on a HTC Wizard 1.3mp (really crappy) camera and worked ok.

Can you try to compare the camera on your wizard with the cam on the iphone?

Try taking pics of a barcode on both, I'm worried with the capability of the iphone in taking close up pics clearly... in my trials the close-ups were too blurry to be usable...

If you can try it that would be great!

I already sold the Wizard, but believe me, the iphone camera is better, both cameras aren't good for close ups, but the app I mentioned managed to read QR codes succesfully.

For anybody curious, I spent part of yesterday and today working on trying to get pixel buffers and stuff on the iPhone to try porting the barcode reader. After crashing the iPhone many many times working with CFImageRefs and stuff, I realized I wasn't even sure if the camera is good enough.

So I lit up the room and took a picture of a nice clean barcode. Opened it up on preview on my mac, and realized that the iPhone's camera is pretty darn crappy.

Since two and three lines can get blended into a gray blob, this isn't going to work because you can't even count the number of lines.

QR codes may work if they're bigger and well lit because of advanced error correction. But they're also harder to decode. I took a picture of one on my monitor and it looked possible to decode.

I made a pinhole camera with paper to try and improve the camera focus. I got this result:



I believe this is (just barely) clear enough to scan. I have some old code for doing ISBN scanning around somewhere - I'll try and dredge it up.

I gave the pinhole camera idea a shot and got a much improved picture out of it.

The code I was looking at to do the scanning is at http://bruji.com/cocoa/barcode.html
Just because it uses Cocoa doesn't mean it'll be easy, since their capture method is highly dependent on Quicktime capture APIs, stuff the iPhone does not have.

I don't have as much time tomorrow, so I doubt I'll finish the translation this week, but now it seems like it's back to being a feasible project idea. Although, the project still won't work too well because you'll need a piece of paper over the lens, and the current preview framerate is like 1 frame per second. (attempts to extract from the live preview have all failed.) It's mainly just for fun, as I don't even know why a barcode scanner would be all that useful right now