The arrival of the new generation of satellite sensors with improved spatial and radiometric resolution (Thematic Mapper and SPOT) requires a re-evaluation of techniques for system performance analysis. Furthermore, the high performance of these systems will place greater demands on resampling algorithms for geometric processing of the imagery. Both of these topics are discussed. A formalism for incorporating random sample-scene phase in system analysis is presented and an improved bicubic resampling function is proposed and compared to standard resampling functions with tests on real imagery.