This essay addresses the contested role of images in digital versions of nineteenth-century scholarly editions and archives. Unlike early generation projects that offered visual information as contextual material or projects that regarded digital images as a reliable, affordable reproduction of the original, recent electronic editions and archives address the status of the core text existing in varying media, and these projects regard high-resolution digital images as constructions. While the latest projects assume that all reproductions are interpretations and hence can never be completely reliable or neutral, the pro-image approach relies on a different solution to the problem of reliability as a whole, which corresponds to a distinct political model of knowledge construction: more eyes as preferable to higher abstraction. By virtue of the triumph of editorial transparency, image-based digital editions and archives have set themselves apart from paper-based critical editions, reasoning that digital reproduction of facsimile material is better than any transcription produced by a few isolated authorities who have rare exclusive access to the originals. Print editions remain a powerful analytical tool, but emerging practices in digital scholarly editing raise the level of analytical powers of scholarly editions, corresponding better to the non-hierarchical nature of the literary text that many literary scholars and students cherish.