man page confusion of ntfsclone

I am a bit confused by the man pages of ntfsclone. In the beginning it says:

The clone, if not using the special image format, is an exact copy of
the original NTFS filesystem from sector to sector thus it can be also
mounted just like the original NTFS filesystem. For example if you
clone to a file and the kernel has loopback device and NTFS support
then the file can be mounted as

              mount -t ntfs -o loop ntfsclone.img /mnt/ntfsclone

Later on it says:

The Special Image Format
It's also possible, actually it's recommended, to save an NTFS filesys‐
tem to a special image format. Instead of representing unallocated
blocks as holes, they are encoded using control codes. Thus, the image
saves space without requiring sparse file support. The image format is
ideal for streaming filesystem images over the network and similar, and
can be used as a replacement for Ghost or Partition Image if it is com‐
bined with other tools. The downside is that you can't mount the image
directly, you need to restore it first.

So I am confused can you mount hd images or can you not mount hd images?