diff --git a/DESCRIPTION b/DESCRIPTION
index c249c47..66af9d8 100644
--- a/DESCRIPTION
+++ b/DESCRIPTION
@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
 Package: scDblFinder
 Type: Package
 Title: scDblFinder
-Version: 1.19.8
+Version: 1.19.9
 Authors@R: c(
     person("Pierre-Luc", "Germain", email="pierre-luc.germain@hest.ethz.ch", role=c("cre","aut"), comment=c(ORCID="0000-0003-3418-4218")),
     person("Aaron", "Lun", email="infinite.monkeys.with.keyboards@gmail.com", role="ctb"))
diff --git a/R/scDblFinder.R b/R/scDblFinder.R
index 48976f3..341ed83 100644
--- a/R/scDblFinder.R
+++ b/R/scDblFinder.R
@@ -199,7 +199,7 @@
 scDblFinder <- function(
   sce, clusters=NULL, samples=NULL, clustCor=NULL, artificialDoublets=NULL,
   knownDoublets=NULL, knownUse=c("discard","positive"), dbr=NULL, dbr.sd=NULL, 
-  dbr.per1k=0.08, nfeatures=1352, dims=20, k=NULL, removeUnidentifiable=TRUE,
+  dbr.per1k=0.008, nfeatures=1352, dims=20, k=NULL, removeUnidentifiable=TRUE,
   includePCs=19, propRandom=0, propMarkers=0, aggregateFeatures=FALSE,
   returnType=c("sce","table","full","counts"),
   score=c("xgb","weighted","ratio"), processing="default", metric="logloss",
diff --git a/inst/NEWS b/inst/NEWS
index d1cbf00..9474aef 100644
--- a/inst/NEWS
+++ b/inst/NEWS
@@ -1,3 +1,7 @@
+Changes in version 1.19.9 (2025-01-07)
++ fixed the default dbr.per1k value in the top-level function
++ slight memory improvements (gc and not coercing DelayedArray before sample split)
+
 Changes in version 1.19.6 (2024-09-19)
 + added a dbr.per1k parameter to set doublet rates per thousands of cells, updated the default from 1 to 0.8\%
 + fixed some issues stemming from the cxds score in some corner cases (absence of inverse correlation between genes)