Why use a Buffered Image insead of an Image?

I'm looking at the code here which let's you drag an image around the screen:
http://www.java2s.com/Code/Java/2D-Graphics-GUI/Imagewithmousedragandmoveevent.htm

Why did they do this:

Why did they have to go through the trouble of making a bufferedimage and then converting it to a graphic and then drawing the image? Why not just instantiate a new Graphic2D object and use that to draw the image?

Sounds like something which would sit better on our GUIs forum. Moving discussion.

Ofcourse I don't know why the author of that code wrote it that way; maybe that person thought that loading a GIF image with getToolkit().getImage(...) is the easiest way to do it. But it's just as easy with ImageIO, and it will directly return a BufferedImage:

No need to draw the image on a new BufferedImage.

Ok, when would you use a BufferedImage instead of just an Image?

Anywhere you require to use API that is present in BufferedImage but not in Image.