A digital image acquisition, transmission and display system based on spectral information has been researched and developed. For practical use of such a system, compression of the enormous image data is necessary. We want to find the compression level at which the degradation can be permitted visually as keeping high color reproduction. In this paper, we investigated the performance of the S-CIELAB (spatial CIELAB) color difference which are studied frequently as a measure for color image quality. Several ways of degradation including low pass filtering in the opponent color space, noise addition, JPEG were applied to three kinds of still images and subjective and objective evaluation experiments were performed. The characteristics of the correlations between subjective evaluation value and objective evaluation value are discussed.