I have 4 binders filled with 35mm black-and-white negatives and contact sheets. I've had good luck scanning the contact sheets, but bad luck scanning the slides. Professional scanning services are 50 cents to $1.25/image. Apparently you don't want to scan to B&W JPEG, because they are only 8-bits deep, but scanning to TIFF results in files that are 20-30 MB/image. And none of the home scanners are truly automatic, by which I mean that I can't just put down the negatives on the scanner, hit a button, and end up with 10 decent scans.
I've also read that Digital ICE doesn't work with black-and-white negatives.
So what's the right approach for scanning a lot of 35mm B&W negatives. I'm interested in preserving them and making them usable. By usable I mean that I want to be able to rapidly search the archives using face recognition and post images to the web.
My budget is $500 to $1000, and the scanning cost of the commercial scanners seems $5000 or more for the amount of images that I have.