Emissive displays use additive color synthesis provided by two dimensional Red Green Blue pixels arrays; reflective displays would use the subtractive color synthesis from primary Cyan Magenta Yellow colors: several attempts show that photographic like structures using 3 active superposed color layers constitutes a very challenging objective. Beside the transflective mode compromise, most current attempts concern black and white or bicolor reflective displays, as well as reflective micro displays for image projectors. After reviewing these technologies, we consider some new approaches to reflective color displays, including the direct color synthesis using physical colors generation such as light dichroic reflection, diffraction and scattering.