Hi Evan, I find I get best results with columns mode on, and partial columns set to ignore. That cuts way down on the junk characters in my scans. I have to admit that I use the optimize feature only as a desperate last resort. Usually I can get settings with extremely great results with a little tweaking on my own, and that's lots faster than optimize. But I've been scanning since 1997 and never had optimize, so I kind of know what I need to do given the results I'm getting. Occasionally I do find something that insists on being an awful mess, and then I break out optimize and see if it does any better than I was doing. When it does, it's usually because one of the settings needs to be set to something really radical that I never would have considered trying, such as a brightness of 40 or 75. Maybe someone else will have some tips on the suspicious region feature; I don't have it because I'm still using k1k version 9. I'm going to upgrade, but I'm going to upgrade my whole computer so I'm going to wait till then. Hth, Kellie To unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to bksvol-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put the word 'unsubscribe' by itself in the subject line. To get a list of available commands, put the word 'help' by itself in the subject line.