Forgot to say that the basketball photo is just as it was taken I did no editing other than to resize it.
Here's an example of a photo that came out fairly good from the same camera. It was also taken in the auto mode but with the white balance set to daylight and only slightly zoomed. It was around 2:30 in the afternoon on a very bright day (yesterday) I was standing on the ground about 3 feet away from the center "leg" of the water tower.
You can see that the camera does well enough outside in bright light. I did resize this one small and sharpen it in photo shop.