I dabbled in film for a while, but only enough to gain a weak understanding of what goes into an exposure.

I bought a Nikon D40 (the bottom end DSLR) about 3 years ago and found out shortly after that you can buy fast manual primes for cheap. I've been in manual mode, chimping without a light meter ever since. It's a fun and fast way to learn.

I think you guys will like this Craigslist find--it's what I've been tinkering with as of late:

Kodak DCS420c (welcome back to 1994). A 1.5 megapixel digital back on a Nikon N90s. No LCD screen. No menus. Besides the delete button, there is not one single digital control. Vitually zero image processing. It's just a big film camera that writes .tiffs onto a PCMIAA drive (I'm using a CF card & adapter).

The sensor is tiny. See the box on the mirror? That's the crop--2.6x baby! Colors are impossible to control if you don't put a hot mirror on the lens. It also can produce moire patterns like you wouldn't believe. And yet, this lack of filtering makes it wickedly sharp.