Something which will grow with them so a little more advanced than a point and shoot.
Main use will be outdoors, nature/wildlife photography. Ability to record good 1080p video would be welcome.
That's tough requirement, even without longer zoom for that price.
Or really even for higher price with basically extinction of fixed lens camera diversity.
And even in "no limits" budget level there's always some compromising.
Weaknesses just move to different areas like portability and convenience...
With system cameras needing to carry multiple lenses and need to change those.
Especially outdoor/nature photography covers huge amount of various areas with vastly different requirements for shooting style and optics.
Even leaving out optics requirements those have lots of requirements.
Like wide landscapes, forests and especially sunsets usually demanding good dynamic range from sensors.
Something not exactly well available from camera with big marketing pee number in smallest commonly used sensor.
Well, at least 1080p video recording is easy to find.
Would have to be very outdated camera to lack it.
But that allows freedom to look for used cameras.
With focus in phone cameras development of fixed lens digicams has really mostly stalled and three to four years old models are perfectly good for getting familiar with taking photos.
Besides giving change to get camera with more direct external controls.
That Canon exactly won't help user to want to learn more about photography and controlling camera.
With pretty much any setting change needing to going to button tap dance menu doesn't make user to want to try them.
While lack of viewfinder teaches bad unstable shooting stance.
And old style fixed LCD is bad in teaching to look for different perspective like near ground level perspective.
In some macro/close up photography getting that camera to right place if extremely important and articulating LCD helps lot in that.
Myself originally though about Powershot G3 (lot higher class than SX540) as first camera.
Fortunately ended to
Minolta Dimage 7i.
With little practising it was possible to use important settings without taking camera from eye...
Powershot G3 certainly wouldn't have inspired me to try different settings as much.
