So I was scanning stuff for the CAA and suddenly my scanner started adding a red tint to everything. I have no idea what happened, I don’t think I changed any settings. Is there any way to fix this, or is this a sign that my scanner is kaput? 
Comparison:
It might be good to post a scan of an image that contains more colours, especially something displaying what ‘humans’ are good at, such as faces, trees, skies, a colourful scene, etc.
That might give a better clue to estimate if this maybe relates to e.g. an incorrect colour profile, or perhaps a specific defect with your scanner.
I’m not a technician but a tint of red usually means a lack of blue in RGB. Maybe there is a faulty contact somewhere if RGB information is transmitted in separate channels. Could also mean the lamp is about to give out. Changed colour profile is another possibility.
Here is a scan of https://www.waltons.ie/home/products/view/11awal-1376-long-the-waltons-guide-to-irish-music/ (which was the thing with the most range of colours I had readily available):
It seems the “preview” in XSane doesn’t distort the colours, even if the final scan does. I’ll try and figure out where XSane/sane stores its settings and I might try and just do a wholesale reset and see if that fixes anything. Edit: Moving ~/.sane out of the way did not change the scan result at all.
I’m not acquainted with this ‘XSane’, but you could perhaps do a test with the scanning software that came with your scanner?
That will probably give a clue if this is hard- or software related.
This is interesting. Can you make sure of this, maybe with comparing your result, zoomed out, to a preview screenshot.
Interesting indeed. I tried to scan with simple-scan and this doesn’t introduce this red tint:
However, this UI is not conducive for mass-scanning a bunch of cover art, so not a long-term solution. 
I tried with Skanlite too, but that had the same results as XSane, probably due to being just a different way to interface with sane.
Curious that resetting the SANE settings does not reset whatever colour calibration is going on. Maybe there are other data being stored somewhere that I didn’t find.
I got the scanner second-hand and I really can’t remember if I got any software with it. Regardless, even if there was software bundled, it would likely be Windows-only and not run under Linux. SANE is the way to deal with scanning under Linux.
Sane is great, I installed Linux instead of Windows 10, just for that!
I had to stay in Windows XP before discovering sane recently.
I hope you will find what can be done.
I don’t know enough yet to help.
But simple-scan is also using sane, with no options, so it’s strange that it does not bug. But it gives hope.
