We are maintaining the membership systems for a large group of medical technicians - every year they do a conference, and we would like to scan their membership ID tags as they enter/leave a conference.  This will allow us to automatically record attendance, without the members having to do this manually later.

I'm looking for a hand-held barcode scanner, that only needs very limited functionality.  Basically I want the unit to store the barcode it scanned, the date/time and the scanner ID (this is so I can calculate what conference they are at).  They need to be easy to use and easy to dock.

I've looked at some of the Motorola kit used by some of the bigger courier companies, this is overkill for this application (most retail around $5k a unit!).  I am on a tight budget with this.

Anyone have any suggestions? The units need to be independent as we can't guarantee reliable wireless connectivity at the venue (the idea is the scanners are docked to a central laptop to sync with the main SQL Server).