Color images, according to Mr. Bodkin, were sluggish to emerge in The Times' news section for a variety of reasons. First, he explained, there was a consensus among executives that the publication should wait until newspaper color printing technology evolved. Then, when it became apparent that black-and-white printing would be adequate for most stories, color photography lost its appeal. He added that executives also believed that readers were becoming desensitized to color pictures because many newspapers then printed only black-and-white photographs. Finally, he said, some editors felt that since most readers were now viewing articles on computer screens, they needed to be presented in black-and-white rather than color. In any case, color photography was never really considered important at The New York Times. Even during its peak years in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when it published more than 1,000 photos a day, only about 10 percent of those shots were color.