You do need deep-learning to get state-of-the-art OCR when the image is not scanned from a book, but photographed text (or text-in-the-wild) in unconstrained conditions.

It is a good example of the superiority of deep learning.

One recent example: Reading Text in the Wild with Convolutional Neural Networks. Jaderberg et al. 2016. https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/publications/2016/Jaderberg...