Thank you for the suggestion. I gave scanimage a try setting depth to 16 and that did indeed work. Thanks to another suggestion I can use krita to manipulate the images as well as verify the color depth.
I tried xsane once again and found that by selecting "show standard options" I can choose bit depth of 8 or 16. I am quite sure that back when I was testing with the previous scanner (HP ScanJet) the color depth option was on the main window. However this may have been with an earlier version of xsane installed on an earlier Ubuntu distribution. So at this point I have an open source solution to scanning and cropping which is great. I am getting many messages saying "Error during CMS conversion: Could not open Scanner ICM profile". I get quite a few hits on that with a Google search so suspect I will be able to eliminate that message. Thanks for the assistance. -- Dale