With slides it's all about the film and lens. Camera features and build quality help with faster drives, better metering, focusing, etc. But the cheapest camera body can still take equally good photos. The only requirement is full manual control of shutter speed and aperture.
With print film, the lab corrects minor exposure errors when they make your prints. But with slide film, if you want it to look perfect you need to get the exposure correct in the camera. Auto exposure is often wrong and you will have to learn to control it manually. If you currently rely on auto exposure and/or have to check your shots to set the exposure you may have disappointing initial results. Spend some time shooting your digital in manual mode to learn exposure times. You’ll find shooting trains in direct sun is easy because it’s always the same subject with the same light source. With ASA 100 film in full daylight you can just set 1/500 f7.1 and go.
Since you’re a Cannon EOS digi guy then get a Cannon EOS film body. But if your current lenses are designed for use only with (APS-C) 24mm sensor cameras they will not have the coverage for full frame 36mm film. You’ll need to get lenses, at least a 50mm “normal” lens. The Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 is good and cheap. Any full frame lens you purchase will add to the capabilities of your digi camera system as well. Alternately you can look for a deal on a full kit of camera and lenses in one of the systems that never went digital. Such as the Minolta or Canon manual focus. The Minolta Rokkor lenses are awesome, but the camera bodies are often cheap junk.
If this is just for fun, than pick up some Sensia or an Extachrome and have fun. If you’re serious, the best option still available is Fuji Provia 100F. It has good color fidelity and resolves finer than any of Canon’s digital cameras. It has been my replacement for Kodachrome 25. It lacks the dynamic range and sharpness of the Kodachrome but Kodachrome is dead. Fuji Velvia is very fine and very popular with landscape film shooters but its dramatic high saturation make it look odd and fake for traditional rail photos.
People say film is too expensive. If you shoot dozens of rolls of crap than yes, but shoot conservatively and it’s vastly cheaper than spending thousands on high-end digi bodies. That being said, I think I’m done with film in 35mm. I finally pulled my Nikon F5 out of the camera bag. It has been displaced by a couple of those expensive digi things. In medium and of course large format sizes, film is still King. Medium format digitals are tens of thousands and still inferior to a $4 roll of film. Today you can still get Provia and Velvia in 8x10” sheets at $10 a shot. When film production is no longer economically viable we will have to wait for a 20gigapixel camera to catch up.
Ok, sorry for the rant. Digital is great but there’s a reason high-end film is still hanging on. Go shoot some and help keep it in production.
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