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Somewhere in deepest darkest Greenwich, out near the Millenium Dome, lies an Odeon multiplex cinema. Formerly a Filmworks, it's the shape of a huge bucket and holds 18 screens including, since December, an IMAX theatre.

How, I wondered, can you cram an IMAX screen into an existing cinema without ripping a good half-dozen other screens out? The answer is that, as it turns out, you don't. You stick a smaller screen in, slap a big IMAX badge on the outside and a few extra quid on each ticket.

Look on the web for information on the Greenwich IMAX and you'll find that IMAX has been outfitting cinemas with a system completely different to its traditional "build a screen the size of Jupiter and project 70mm film on it" setup for some time. Some people are very angry with the fact that the new, identically named, IMAX system is obviously inferior to the original as it uses a far smaller screen and relatively low-spec projectors (two 2K, rather than 4K, models). You'll also find an Odeon website blathering about "floor to ceiling screens" and "theatre geometry", while a local newspaper report shows four kids with an oversized ticket and the rather grainy picture of the screen I've reproduced above.

Nothing on the web, though, could tell me what I needed to know: should we pick an IMAX showing of the film (conforming entirely to stereotype, we wanted to see Star Trek) at Greenwich or the slightly cheaper 35mm screening next door? So, dear Google indexing robots and those who may be searching for the same information, here's my two cents.

The IMAX screen (9) is, appropriately, one of the biggest – almost 240 seats in three banks. Most of the central bank are "premier" seats that cost extra. We were on the aisle on a side bank about two thirds of the way up, and the view was fine – the rake's quite steep, so you can see clearly over those in front. The screen itself is nowhere near IMAX size, but large enough for the auditorium and, yes, almost floor to ceiling, while the sound system is impressive if terrifyingly loud. The image in our showing was brilliant for roughly two hours of the film, but marred by annoying blue stripes for about two minutes near the start – whatever caused these, they were fortunately banished.

So, is this new, smaller IMAX a con? Possibly – it's certainly confusing. Is it worth a fiver per ticket if you know it's not proper IMAX, though? I'd say so: short glitch aside, the picture is better than most that I've seen in UK multiplexes lately, so you're paying a bit more for a high quality digital screening. And, as an added bonus, there's very little pre-film advertising to suffer through – just a few IMAX idents and two of the dumbest trailers I've ever seen (Transformers 2 and, honestly, GI Joe The Movie). Go, gawk, enjoy – just don't cough up any more for the Premier seats.

Oh, and Star Trek is really rather good. Thanks for asking.

I spend far too much time on Flickr and a lot of that time gawking at photos shot on old-fashioned film. Flickr may have millions of users toting digital-compacts, and probably just as many who are unhealthily obsessed with their DSLRs, but it also has a really strong community of those who won't – and it's mainly won't, rather than can't – move from film to digital. And many of them take some really beautiful photos.

And you can see why. For one, some films seem to impart a unique look to photos that's at best time-consuming and at worst impossible to replicate on a digital image. I loved the look I could get from Provia in my F80, even if it did cost a fortune to process and posed serious questions about how much film it is acceptable to keep in a small home fridge:

Film also imposes some discipline that's helpful if, like me, you have a tendency toward crap photos. Each roll holds only a few shots, so you must compose each carefully. And then there's the cult-of-film aspect: unlike the millions of plebs who take digital snaps, film photography is, now, a more niche pursuit. Those with a liberal arts degree might want to to knock up one of those dichotomy lists so beloved of theorists and/or poseurs (digital/film, many/few, snapshot/art, blah), not that it would prove anything. But anyhow. I owned several film cameras, then sold my best to buy a DSLR because digital photography is, in every way, more practical.

And then on Sunday, while diving through cardboard boxes in pursuit of batteries, I found one of my film cameras: a "vintage" (old) 1973 Zenit E SLR. This camera was made in the USSR, designed with the aesthetic care and attention usually lavished on anti-aircraft emplacements and made from what I think is a solid chunk of aluminium. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be radioactive – it's got that "made before safetly considerations" look to it. And then, lurking in the bottom of the box, a spare roll of film. What better way to waste a sunny afternoon than to give it a whirl.

The Zenit has five shutter speeds (plus one for bulb exposures) selected via a dial that regularly falls off the camera and its light meter gave up the ghost some time ago. Probably before I was born, actually. Remarkably the results came out pretty well exposed, and a few of them look OK. I quite like the soft background and colours on this:

while Hunter survived his visit to the 1970s, too:

And there's no denying that using the Zenit is strangely fun: the viewfinder makes everything look like a 1980s Thames TV broadcast viewed on a slightly frazzled Trinitron, all colour-cast and barrel distortion, and there's an amazing mechanical KER-CHUNK noise when you press the shutter accompanied by the whiz of the speed selector spinning around and doing its best to remove the skin from your hand.

There's also something undeniably neat about taking photos with a camera that requires not a single battery: the Zenit could probably survive a nuclear blast and still work (in fact, it'd serve as a handy hammer should you need to take part in civilisation-rebuilding). Truth be told, everything about taking photos on film again was enjoyable. So will I start lugging the Zenit, or perhaps a more practical film camera, around along with the D80? No chance. And here's why:

Dust. Gets. Fucking. Everywhere.

That's the shot of Hunter in Lightroom, and each circle is a dust spot correction that I had to add to remove the assortment of crap, crud, grime, hair and fluff that my film scanner picked up. And that's on a negative strip straight from the lab (there's one, conveniently, across from my office). Argh. And many of the other frames were far, far worse, to the point where I couldn't be bothered to clean them up. If it weren't for Lightroom's tools I probably would have just given up and chucked the film out.

So that's quite enough messing around with stips of chemically-treated plastic for now. I've packed the film scanner away again, and put the D80 back in the bag with a 4GB card (400 JPEGs – luxury. In my day, etc). But I won't be throwing the Zenit away – I'll come back to give it another try. Next summer, maybe.