The aims of this study were to investigate the feasivility of analyzing a few sorting factors such as size, coloration and defect of apples with a monochrome image processing system and to find apparent properties which could be effectively used for apple sorting. The results are summarized as follows. 1. A computer program was made to analyze the projection area, coloration and defect of an apple with a monochrome image processing system. 2. The algorithm developed to compute the projedtion area of an apple was between on the proportional relation between a given reference area and the corresponding number of pixels, and the computing time was 0.74 to 0.82 second depending on the size of apple. 3. The coloration of an apple was expressed as the ratio of the gray value of a reference color to that of a given bounded area of the stem end surface (defined as coloration index), and the computing time was about 3.0 seconds with this algorithm. 4. Defect of an apple could be isolated by lowpass filtering and image subtraction but it took about 20 seconds in computing time. 5. The coloration of the Fuji apple could be classified into 3 to 4 groups by the coloration index and also, it was found that the correlation coefficient between the indices and sugar contents was 0.74. 6. The coloration index obtained from a given bounded area of the stem end side of the Fuji apple could represent the coloration of total surface with a correlation coefficient of 0.922.