There is no best first film camera, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling one. There are four sensible answers, and which one is right depends on a question only you can answer: what do you want the camera to do while you are using it?
If you want to learn how exposure works
Buy a mechanical SLR with a working meter. A Pentax K1000, an Olympus OM-1, a Nikon FM. You set the aperture and the shutter speed yourself, the meter tells you whether you got it right, and after three rolls you understand something that no amount of reading teaches.
The trade: your first roll will be mostly wrong. That is the point.
If you want to carry it everywhere
Buy a compact. An Olympus Trip 35 needs no battery at all. A Canon Sure Shot or an Olympus Mju will focus for you. They go in a coat pocket, they are quiet, and you will use them, which matters more than any specification.
The trade: little control, and on the zone-focus ones you have to estimate the distance.
If you want the picture more than the process
Buy an automatic SLR. A Canon AE-1, a Canon A-1, a Nikon FE. The camera handles the exposure and you handle the framing. You still get interchangeable lenses and a proper viewfinder.
The trade: an electronic shutter. Flat battery, no camera. Carry a spare cell.
If you already know what you are doing
You do not need this article. But if you are returning after twenty years: the lenses you kept are probably worth more than the body you are about to buy, and that is a good reason to buy a body that takes them.
What actually decides whether it works
Not the model. The condition. A tired Nikon takes worse photographs than a good Pentax, and no amount of reputation changes that. So whatever you are looking at, the questions are the same:
- Does the shutter run at every speed? The slow ones are where a tired camera shows itself.
- Does the meter respond? Point it at bright, then dark, and watch the needle move.
- Are the light seals done? Forty-year-old foam is tar, and tar fogs film.
- Is the lens clean and dry? Haze softens everything. Oil on the aperture blades makes them sluggish, and a sluggish aperture overexposes.
- What is the battery? Some cameras were built around mercury cells nobody sells any more.
A seller who can answer all five has tested the camera. A seller who answers none has not.
And the film
Whatever camera you choose, the first roll should be cheap colour negative film in daylight. Not slide film, not pushed black and white. Learn what the camera does before you ask it to do anything difficult.
Everything at Unseend is tested against that list before it is listed, and what was found is written on the page — including what could not be tested.