Abstract: A system, apparatus and method for testing the functional components of an electronic digital imaging system is described. The system includes apparatus for image acquisition, storage, display, communication and printing. The system relies on a closed loop analysis to test system components by measuring a set of statistical image quality metrics. The expected set of statistics are in the form of special purpose features stored as a data set representative of an expected reference object. The closed loop analysis measures, for example, the quality of the printing component of the system by outputting a copy of the expected reference image, using the acquisition component to input the copy of the expected reference image, and then comparing the statistics against threshold values representative of an ideally operating component. The comparison of statistics against the threshold values provides a go/no-go measure of component performance and can indicate sources of system degradation.