dag, going from your example, I compared numbers for the red part of the lamp, hex value 94231B.
now, in the original scene the RGB numbers for that color read:
Code: Select all
0.580 0.137 0.106
Code: Select all
0.296 0.0168 0.01096
so, somewhere in the Blender pipeline the color is not being interpreted the same from one scene to another.
I'm pretty sure the original scene was created with an older version of Blender, but I don't know which one now. I see that Blender color management was changed somewhere back in version 2.5, so that could be it, but I don't think my scene is that old... and besides that it's strange that the viewport would display the color correctly even though the values are so different.
anyway, with the same color tested on the new material in the new scene I can confirm that gamma 1.0 setting works fine.