In addition to a couple of answers here a few pointers (Spring 4.1).
Incase you don't have any messageconverters configured in your WebMvcConfig, having ResponseEntity inside your @ResponseBody works well.
If you do, i.e. you have a MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter configured (like me) using the ResponseEntity returns a org.springframework.http.converter.HttpMessageNotWritableException.
The only working solution in this case is to wrap a byte[] in the @ResponseBody as follows:
@RequestMapping(value = "/get/image/{id}", method=RequestMethod.GET, produces = MediaType.IMAGE_PNG_VALUE)
public @ResponseBody byte[] showImageOnId(@PathVariable("id") String id) {
    byte[] b = whatEverMethodUsedToObtainBytes(id);
    return b;
}
In this case do rememeber to configure the messageconverters properly (and add a ByteArrayHttpMessageConverer) in your WebMvcConfig, like so:
@Override
public void configureMessageConverters(List<HttpMessageConverter<?>> converters) {
    converters.add(mappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter());
    converters.add(byteArrayHttpMessageConverter());
}
@Bean
public MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter mappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter() {
    ObjectMapper objectMapper = new ObjectMapper();
    objectMapper.disable(SerializationFeature.WRITE_DATES_AS_TIMESTAMPS);
    objectMapper.setSerializationInclusion(JsonInclude.Include.NON_NULL);
    MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter converter = new MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter();
    converter.setObjectMapper(objectMapper);
    return converter;
}
@Bean
public ByteArrayHttpMessageConverter byteArrayHttpMessageConverter() {
    ByteArrayHttpMessageConverter arrayHttpMessageConverter = new ByteArrayHttpMessageConverter();
    arrayHttpMessageConverter.setSupportedMediaTypes(getSupportedMediaTypes());
    return arrayHttpMessageConverter;
}
private List<MediaType> getSupportedMediaTypes() {
    List<MediaType> list = new ArrayList<MediaType>();
    list.add(MediaType.IMAGE_JPEG);
    list.add(MediaType.IMAGE_PNG);
    list.add(MediaType.APPLICATION_OCTET_STREAM);
    return list;
}