I've set up xsane (0l99+0.991-2) with a new scanner (Epson Expession 1680), and I find that when I go to save a preview of a color scan as a tiff file, the resulting file is in proper colors in only about the bottom 5%, and the remainder of the file is black. When I save as a PNG, however, the saved file is completely in color.
I'm more or less using xsane defaults. Haines Brown