I might as well add one of my recommendations:
If you want to photograph the moon, planets, stars, meteors and satellites, as some people here might want to do, make sure that the focus defaults to infinity if it's fully automatic. Such pictures don't turn out too well when the lovely all-auto camera thinks the subject is just in front of the lens.
I'm a long-term invalid now, but was formerly a professional wedding / portrait / model / child / animal photographer, plus owned a camera store and studio in the 70s and 80s and taught photography and judged competitions for nearby camera clubs.
In 1986 I got interested in astronomical photography thanks to Halley's Comet, and after a bit of experience always got what I wanted on film.
Anyway, long story short, in 2011 I was able to afford a modest digital camera and after a lot of study found that the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ40 met most of my requirements and available cash. It was already superseded by the next model, but I preferred its specs, which included Starry Sky mode and exposures up to one minute, though I would have preferred five minutes at least and up to thirty.
The horrors when I got home and found, buried on page 99 of the 223-page manual, the following regarding Starry Sky mode:
"We recommend using prefocus (P74) to focus on a subject, such as a bright star or a distant light, that is easy to focus on."
The bloody maniacs! How does one do that when alone in a dark-sky area well away from city lights, when no stars can be seen on the screen? If ONLY they made it default to infinity, or allowed manual focus! Under those conditions I can shoot the moon, but I can't shoot stars or satellites when it's not visible. Can only do them when there's light in the sky and can prefocus on earthbound scenery, which is sometimes too slow anyway.
Another fault: I do a lot of sunsets and when I zoom in to get the green flash the camera automatically turns the scene red, whereas our beautifully clear New Zealand skies usually give us a wonderful golden-orange sun in blue sky with pink clouds. Frustrating!
At least I get far more green flashes than northern hemisphere folk do, apparently.
And a 223-page manual! With all my experience I don't have a clue why I might want so many of the camera's features, and the manual doesn't tell me why either, so how could any beginner understand the camera and get the best from it?
Secretly, I want a Canon SLR, I think. I've owned cameras that handled five different film formats and used even more, and the best 35mm film-camera for me, right up to the end, was the early-1970s Canon EF. I still have two of them -- one well-used and one mint.
One excellent thing the EF did was what KA9Q alluded to above -- it allowed me to take two pictures very quickly, which was useful when shooting wedding candids and groups.
The winder had a large stand-off and short throw and even allowed the shutter to be pressed with pressure put on the winder. It probably had very sturdy mechanics under the winder too, because I never wrecked them after taking thousands of photos.
Every now-and-then at weddings and socials a guy (never a female, drat it!) would come up to me and say, "Man, you're fast -- where's your winder?" I'd grin and hold up my thumb. That and the camera were faster than any winder and only slightly slower than a big motor-drive. In fact, I had to move the lens a little up, down or sideways between shots so I could pick the difference between prints of the two.
One opinionated opinion I have: Those cameras which need to be held way-out-in-front-of-your-face-to-see-the-screen are utterly daft if you want better than fuzzy, shaky snapshots some of the time. But it's okay for anyone else here to disagree!
