The recent silver shock has ironically revealed the difficulty of total or even partial replacement of this material in the image recording field. To explore a new, ideal model for image forming system not dependent on silver, the present review first summarizes the current status of non-silver image forming systems in contrast to the classically ideal silver halide system to conduct the following conclusions. i) The concept of silver saving is broken down to the replacement of the unique functions fulfilled by the silver halide system, i.e., the exceptionally high photographic speed associated with a high S/N ratio, and the log E -linear imaging response. ii) These functions will most promisingly be replaced by physical photosensors the time-sequential signal from which is processed so as to simulate the response of the silver halide system. Analysis of the image formation technologies based on time-sequential signals shows that, due to the ease of signal amplification, the key technology shifts from visualization to image stabilization. Then, a new viewpoint of classifying image forming methods is shown on the basis of image stabilization. Finally, a few proposals are given as for the reduction of the number of processing steps with a stress on image stabilization.