Images in The_Excerpt!

Hey guys, a quick question here.
I don’t want to display the_content on my main page simply because it would take up too much space on my site with all of those posts stacked. So why not use the_excerpt you say? well, I want images in my posts..even the the_excerpt..

How can I go about implementing this? I’ve google searched around..found some plugins that didn’t quite work as I planned. Anyway other than a plugin to write this in? some handy code perhaps?

Thanks a bunch guys!