[en] One major problem when producing images with the aid of Poisson distributed quanta is how best to compromise between spatial and contrast resolution. Increasing the number of image elements improves spatial resolution, but at the cost of fewer quanta per image element, which reduces contrast resolution. Information theory arguments are used to analyse this problem. It is argued that information capacity is a useful concept to describe an important property of the imaging device, but that in order to compute the information content of an image produced by this device some statistical properties (such as the a priori probability of the densities) of the object to be depicted must be taken into account. If these statistical properties are not known one cannot make a correct choice between spatial and contrast resolution. (author)