Ah, so it's not my scanner, but Blogger that's gone dark... This is just a test post. As you can see by comparing with the previous posting of these same files, they are now displayed much grayer. Grrrrr. I thought I checked that before I bought a new scanner...
Argh. My new scanner takes just as dim pictures as the old one. And these looked a lot brighter in gimp and geeqie. I need to study image processing. Oh well, since I plan to spend the rest of my life making pictures, that's only reasonable.