Advanced Custom Fields - category image

Question

I'm trying to get an image for I previously assigned to a category using ACF.

here's what I'm doing:

$category_image = the_field('cat_small', $linkedcat);

where $linkedcat is something like category_280

When I echo $category_image, i see an array, like so:

261, , catsmall, , , http://localhost/current/dpf/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/catsmall.jpg, Array

Any idea what I'm doing wrong? Many thx!

Alex