DB Image views as ASCII chars

Hi all, My Content-Type header is correctly set, however, whenever I try to load the image (i.e. echo $myimage), it's being shown as ASCII chars. This happens only when I load the image after executing previous output command like echo. If I load the image at the begining of my php file, it would load fine. (In my case, I need to load the image in the middle of an article) Anyone knows anything about this? Thanks, Ayman