The basic ideas and technique for recording using grating and retrieving full color images with panchromatic black and white film were presented in 1899. Since then, this technique has undergone much suffering. At the early stage, some authors used color images to modulate spatial carriers, i. e., gratings, which is analogous to the method of using temporal signals to modulate temporal carriers in electronics. After ten years, few people paid attention to this filed of research. Things remained like that for nearly half a century. In this period, a comparatively important result in this respect was recoding color information on a black and white film with three colored filters and three gratings of different azimuthal orientations in three exposures and reconstructing the transparency thus obtained into a full color image. In the sixties, interest in this technique was aroused again and some importent achievements appeared, including a snapshot method for color encoding using a tricolor grating and design for and manufacture of cameras implementing this snapshot method. Successful field tests of this color method was conducted for both military applications and television news. Another important achievement in the late sixties was that the importance of maintaining a linear relation between total input exposure and amplitude transmittance of the processed film during recording was realized and analyzed in detail. And good decoding systems were put forward based on Fourier optics. But since the early eighties, especially the mid eighties, almost nobody has taken an interest in this field of research and no important progress has been made. This technique's many practical drawbacks and the development of the highly practical tripack color films make this technique almost obsolete. Except that it still has some applications in multiple image storage and multispectral photography, it is no match for modern color photography in both quality and price.