i have to update my review... there is a demo version and it worked instantly with my "update challenged" epson expression 1600 pro scanner... and would have done a fine job recognizing german text... except it won't *display* german text... i get lots of nonsense characters i have to convert from within textedit (i recommend word services very strongly - available for free!). but as the recognition is quite consistent and acurate, changing the encoding is easily done.
so it's thumbs up for the quality of recognition and system integration but thumbs down for localisation... and one more thing: recognition from previously scanned tiffs (and 1bit tiffs are the only option) is very poor!