After my good friend @sbfaulkner prompted me with a link to ZBar, I spent a little Saturday wet and rainy day hacking - before long I had ZBar (via TiBar) and RedLaser up and running side by side on my the ole iPhone 4.
RedLaser is a commercial Barcode scanning SDK to incorporate into native Objective-C iPhone Apps. ZBar (http://zbar.sourceforge.net/) is an opensource alternative via TiBar (http://code.google.com/p/tibar/), can be extended as a Module in the Appcelerator Titanium abstraction layer.
Unfortunately at this time RedLaser can't be incorporated into Titanium, but it was an interesting test to see the side by side performance, so here's a little video on some standard household items.
Ultimately RedLaser is much nicer, but if you are using Appcelerator, ZBar is a viable alternative right now for hacking projects (lots of don't use this in production disclaimers)
I was *really* impressed with RedLaser, I went on a 'scan-a-thon' round the house and it pretty much got everything except the tiniest labels covered in dirt. With ZBar you had to wait for a picture capture to find out wether it worked or not, slower but still got a reasonable amount of barcodes.
