howto check user level or role

In comments i want to check if the user is contributer or subscriber, if he’s contributer i want to display a image with the name.

i tried lots of stuff in comment just before <?php comment_author_link(); ?> and they don’t seem to work.

can anyone help, Last i tried was something like

if ( current_user_can('level_1')) {
echo "show image"; }
else
{
echo "no image"; }