A bug has been reported on the tango mailing list:
PyTango write_attribute fails for spectrum and image attributes when PyTango is installed without numpy support:
test.double_image = [(1.0,),]
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "[...]/PyTango/device_proxy.py", line 129, in __DeviceProxy__setattr
self.write_attribute(name, value)</module></stdin>
TypeError: unsupported data_format.
Fixed in PyTango SVN trunk since revision #24837.
Will become visible in next PyTango release 8.1.2