The weirdest part is, I scanned my roll of reala fine, now suddenly I'm trying to scan my friend's roll of ektar and its producing INCREDIBLY bright previews, we're talking RGB values of about 100-125 in the area between frames. Analog gain and all other settings are at factory default.

mine went wacko too ... I had to do a force reset to factory default and deleted all the "saved settings" I'd made.

check if its doing auto-exposure on anything in your preferences. If you then do a manual contrast setting it seems to do it again on scan essentially doubling things.

I highly recommend scanning neg as pos in my workflow

http://cjeastwd.blogspot.com/2009/10/quick-negative-scan-tutorial.html

PS ... a scan from yesterday in full sunlight in snow

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4015/4457191029_f3d81db407.jpg (http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4015/4457191029_3575c72f91_o.jpg)

done using my above method. Using scan as neg my LS-4000 blew out the snow and gave way more grain in the shadow blue/cyan areas

I happened to be comparing my G1 (with a 1/2 focal length lens) and noticed that I got this level of detail

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2708/4457968850_67214f06d6.jpg (http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2708/4457968850_6421075a34_o.jpg)

and that top LS4K image was scaled back from 3657 pixels high to 3000 pixels high to make the comparison with the G1 easier.

gosh I like negative for capture