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I built a home-grown scanner like this one (not with ZBar though) for my asset tracking web app (www.assetbots.com) and agree that for 1D barcodes a cheap bluetooth or USB scanner is hard to beat.

We support both (camera and external), but surprisingly a lot of our customers find the camera good enough. Code 128 is our second-most scanned symbology behind QR.

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A big factor in my industry was scanning damaged barcodes, which was frequent since they're attached to indoor/outdoor plants and physical boxes that get moved around. They get weathered and scraped.

If there's even slight damage to the barcode, forget the browser scanners, you can scan that thing until the next Olympics and not get a read. HID scanners don't skip a beat.

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