An assessment of the operational cartographic capability of SPOT in Indonesia is presented from the points of view of (1) the size of the smallest distinguishable land cover units through computation of the percentages of pure pixels per unit and dominant unit per pixel and (2) planimetric accuracy. Generally speaking, units larger than 0.16 and 0.05ha can be distinguished with SPOT multispectral (XS) and panchromatic (P) data respectively. For full images, basic manipulations (bilinear transformation or shift, enlargement and rotation) of level-IB SPOT digital data and photographs provide standard deviation accuracies towards local Transverse Mercator (LTM) maps of 2 and 3 pixels, respectively. Due to the poor reliability of most LTM maps, SPOT should undoubtedly be used as a major cartographic data source in Indonesia.