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