We prove that the \(L^2\) distance between the minimizer of the \(\ell ^1\) -anisotropic Rudin-Osher-Fatemi (ROF) functional and its minimizer over the space of piecewise constant functions on a rectilinear grid is \(\mathcal {O}(h^{{1}/{2} - {q'}/{2q}})\) , where h is the grid’s mesh size and the datum belongs to \(L^q\) , \(q \ge 2\) . These convergence rates are valid in any dimension \(d\ge 1\) . However, in dimension \(d = 1\) they can be further improved to \(\mathcal {O}(h^{{1}/{2} - {1}/{2q}})\) . To establish the error bounds, \(L^q\) estimates of the ROF minimizer in terms of the datum are critical. Such estimates are particular cases of a universal minimality property of the ROF minimizer derived in the second part of the paper. There it is shown, in both the finite-dimensional and infinite-dimensional settings, that the minimizer simultaneously minimizes a broad class of convex functionals over a neighbourhood of the datum arising in the convex dual of the ROF problem. This extends previous results of similar type about taut strings and the ROF problem.