I guess these factors could probably be reduced with more money? I don't mean paying more for the job: I mean using the API to ask a second human to verify the results of the first human and/or fix typos.
I don't see how this gadget is particularly useful in any way, any more than the first "automated chess device" with a midget inside moving chess pieces around was actually revolutionary.
The comments on how it would be useful for the blind (with braille or speech synthesis) is as close as I've seen to a reasonable justification for it. Even then it's a stretch. Beyond that, basing it on Mechanical Turk means every "photo" costs money, and frankly doesn't provide much value.
If you want to caption your photos it would be much better to do it AFTER you've pruned the ones you don't care about, so you're not paying for descriptions of 100 throwaway photos for every keeper. In which case the fact that the camera itself is hooked up to Mechanical Turk is just a gimmick, since it would be easier to run a script on your desktop or on a server.
(I should add that I know that Amazon offers a review process, but I am not sure how it integrates with the above camera, and I am thus assuming that the camera automatically has to accept a description as correct before printing it out. This might not be the case; and I don't know.)
I think I agree. This camera is cute but this particular implementation has flaws -- that's what I said before and what I hoped would be my take-home message, and I guess I didn't highlight that enough. I certainly didn't intend, "oh, fix this before it goes into production!" or anything like that.
He's also a writer for Make: http://blog.makezine.com/author/makemattr/
I think the key is that he's one of those people who are experimenting with mashing up not only different technologies but also different generations of technologies.
I guess one could call this stuff "parlor tricks" as one other person said but I agree that it's totally within the spirit of hackernews.