If you're really interested in color work, then you need to define for yourself why you want color. This will help you in choosing the film. Choosing a film type is like setting up your color palette if you're a painter.

Each film has its own special way of rendering color. As you've seen from the responses, each person has their own favorite films. Negative films give greater latitude while transparency films compress tonal ranges.

Certain films give specific colors added emphasis. For example, Portra leans towards greens and blues very slightly and has a very "fresh" clean looking color rendering. If you were to shoot E100G, you'd find a film that has more latitude than Provia and gives a "thicker" or "meatier" color rendering.

Kodak's UC color negative film is probably the best color neg film Kodak has ever produced for general outdoor photography. Both the 100 and 400 versions give punchy, long scale renderings.

However, it's not the film I'd use on a commercial architectural shoot where absolute accurate color was a requirement.

I hope this helps you understand my comment that you really need to define the "why in color" portion of what you're doing. If you can understand why you're shooting a subject in color, then choosing the right film will enhance the color rendering which reinforces the image itself.

Why film rather than digital?

My personal problem with digital cameras is that they make everything look the same. In color, you're really imaging the color temperature of the light itself. Each film has its own personality that responds to color temperature changes in a unique way giving the image a specific "look."

That's what's missing from digital color work outdoors. How in PS do you make a digital camera image look like it was taken with Provia using an 81A filter at a color temperature of 4137?

You can take a digital image, go into PS change the color temperature to 4137 and apply an 81A filter - but, it won't look like it was taken on Provia because there is NO WAY to duplicate the film's unique response - which includes some unequal color response because the film's spectral response in each layer.

Likewise, if you shot the same scene with E100G with an 81A filter it would look nothing like the Provia, and you couldn't make that difference in PS without first SEEING the difference as it was rendered on film.

It gets back to the color palette of the film and being able to use that palette under different types of light to show the light color qualities and NOT just an image in color.