Low success rate with pytesser? Is this an issue of noise, or is there something else that needs to be done?

I'm trying to detect a few uppercase characters from a screen shot. I convert it to black and white with PIL, and then using the code example from the PyTesser page, I run tesser.exe on the image:

from pytesser import *
image = Image.open('fnord.tif') 
print image_to_string(image)     

I'm using this image:

But it doesn't recognize it as an E, or really anything for that matter. I think that it's a clean enough capture? The noise at the top isn't throwing it off, right?

Is there something I'm missing?