The paper compares the history of printing, photography and digital hardcopy from the viewpoint of color recording. Digital prints as well as painting in color appeared relatively early in their histories. In contrast, color photography was realized a century after the invention of monochromatic photography. Printing, which is another system only for image display, in color appeared immediately after the invention of Gutenberg with help of human manual operation at the plate preparation. All of these facts strongly indicate, i) the paticular difficulty of image capture for live scenes and also ii) the ease with which systems based on scanning output record color. The similarity of the information processing of human being and that of plate preparation in printing is also stressed.
