Remote management system for photographic equipment

A management system for remotely managing the operational conditions of photographic apparatus at a plurality of lab shops, said system comprising the following steps:

• connecting at least one of said photographic apparatus and a separate, independent densitometer to a sub-computer installed at each of said lab shops;
• fetching into said sub-computer the production data of said photographic apparatus and the density data of a check sample, produced as a final product by one of said photographic apparatus, measured with said densitometer;
• transferring on-line said data fetched into said sub-computer to a main computer at a central location via a remote communication line;
• and
• diagnosing the photofinishing quality in said main computer in accordance with said measured density data by referring to said production to said production data.

A management system for remotely managing the production conditions at a plurality of lab shops, said system comprising the following steps:

• connecting at least one photographic apparatus, which includes a printer processor and a film processor, to a sub-computer installed at each of said lab shops;
• performing production management by fetching into said sub-computer the production data of said photographic apparatus;
• and
• determining the consumed state of consumable goods in accordance with said production data for ordering on-line said consumable goods to a main computer at the headquarters via a communication line if a predetermined amount of said consumable goods are consumed.

A port controller interposed between a computer and a plurality of photographic apparatus for performing data communication therebetween, said port controller comprising:

• a switch unit for selecting one of said plurality of photographic apparatus, for performing data communication;
• a first communication control unit for finding an idle time of a CPU incorporated in said selected photographic apparatus, and performing data communication at the data transfer speed of said CPU during said idle time;
• a buffer memory for storing said data fetched irregularly from said selected photographic apparatus;
• a subject communication discriminator unit for discriminating whether said data in said buffer memory to be transferred to said computer is the data of said selected photographic apparatus requested by said computer;
• a data format converter unit for converting said data read from said buffer memory into a data format of said computer;
• and
• a second communication control unit for transferring said format-converted data in units of block to said computer at the data transfer speed of said computer.