Copy image quality is generally evaluated at the time of shipment according to the copier manufacturer's design criteria. In practice, the designers of copiers do not fully know what types of images users want, so there is a tendency to set the shipping evaluation criteria by experience and intuition. This study aimed at enabling optimum design by using evaluation sample images and relating users, subjective evaluations with physical image evaluations by the MT system. In this first report, methods of evaluating physical characteristics of copy images were studied, and the S/N ratios of the evaluated characteristics were determined. Based on the resultant data, a unit space was created from images that satisfied users, and it was verified that lower rated images had greater Mahalanobis distances from the unit space.
