To provide a graphical user interface(GUI) of a control panel screen for allowing a user to perform various operations in a portable information terminal having the control panel screen or picture recording and reproducing equipment, especially, equipment having a compact display screen which can be easily carried by solving the problem that it is difficult for a user who operates the control panel while viewing menu display to be used at the time of calling various functions on the control panel to discriminate menu items when the number of menu items is large.

As for higher rank menus in which lower rank menus are displayed, marks indicating the correlation are displayed so as to be easily recognized compared with the other items, and when the number of the hierarchies of the menus is large, the menus are scrolled out to the outside of a screen from the upper rank menu as necessary so that it is possible to allow a user to exactly select a desired item in this GUI.