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.
I launched Assetbots (https://www.assetbots.com/) last year and went through a lot of ups and downs transitioning into the "people give me money" phase of the SaaS journey.
This year I plan to go all-in on scaling customer acquisition and getting the business out of infancy and into the next level of growth.
I never realized just how bad this can be until I started selling/marketing my startup. I was so confused by the reaction to my participation on a few subreddits where my target customers hang out - I had never experienced anything like it before.
I started to see patterns (not only against my posts personally, although I quickly stopped trying to participate) because I began to understand the market players. It's unreal how inauthentic most of the content actually is and how much of it is straight up shill marketing. I suspect this is true for a large number of niche forums where specific products or services become "blessed" by the community.
The only way to accomplish this is with either a large network of puppet accounts or with the support of the moderators. Probably both.
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.