The answer is about £700. That is the premium being paid in Tokyo for non-digital cameras by nostalgics fearful that the age of film photography is finally drawing to a close.

Which, surely, it is. Film fetishists will still be able to queue up outside artisanal basements in Berlin and Chicago for specially ordered, handmade 35mm rolls in genuine retro two-tone grey plastic containers. They may even find monocled specialists who can mend a broken Pentax winding mechanism from way back in the mid-1990s. But the news that Minolta, Fuji and Nikon are all discontinuing or cutting back their lines of analogue cameras is the writing on the wall of great collective darkroom wherein the 20th century was washed in red-lit chemicals and hung up to dry in rectangles of miraculously captured light.

To take its place, the apprentices to Japan’s master photographic craftsmen are pumping out digicams and memory cards and desktop colour printers. We are all one-stop Snappy Snappers now, shooting everything we see, discarding everything we wish we hadn’t and Photoshopping what remains until reality retreats into the background. The slow click of a manual shutter can still freeze that retreat, but only one frame at a time. Everywhere else, the pixel rules.

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