Many veterinarians purchasing digital radiographic equipment spend much of  their time looking at hardware specs such as detector type, lines per millimeter, MTF, and others. As I say in my lectures, unless the reason you are buying a digital radiography system is because your film just does not give you enough MTF – stop spending your time worrying about MTF and focus on the vendor special sauce. In many cases, the hardware specs are even not quite truthful.

You should be spending your time worry about image quality, service, and features.

A quiz to make a point.

Question: which image do you prefer?

Image 1

Image 2

Answer: Image 2.  However,  that was something of  a trick question. It is clear that the second image has much more contrast and and overall better appearance as the first image. Nonethless, they are exactly the same image.  

Look closely, these images are  the same image of the same animal, with the same hardware that had the same LPMM, MTF, Fill Factor, pixel pitch, and detector composition. As you can see clearly from this example, something else is dramatically affecting image quality between these two images because the hardware has not changed.

That something is the vendor secret special sauce - which is better known as image processing. It is the image processing that has the greatest effect on your image quality. I have seen vendors with good image processing take inferior hardware and make good-looking images. I have also seen vendors with bad image processing upgrade their software and, without changing their hardware, their images were improved 100%. That is the case with these images.

Conclusion: image processing is as important - if not more important -  than any hardware spec you can find. Dramatic improvements in image quality are also why you need to stay current with your vendors software releases. Many times, they can significantly improve your system without any change in hardware.