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As a long time user of Apple products I for one really appreciate the amount of time that goes into not only the functionality and ease of use of their products, but also the industrial design. I think a lot of users choose Apple products because they do what they are supposed to do, but they also look cool! The iPhone is no exception. It's a beautiful product. As a person in both the graphic design and photography industry, looks are important to me too. I upgraded to the iPhone 4 for all the obvious reasons. However, there was one feature that was very high on my list and that was the improved 5MP camera that also shoots 720p HD video. I had already pretty much stopped carrying a point and shoot camera. If the video was as good as Apple claimed on the iPhone 4 I figured I could pretty much stop carrying a separate video camera too. After I got my iPhone 4 setup, naturally one of the first things I tried was the camera. I gotta say that I was extremely disappointed. My photos appeared to have a very very very yellow/orange tint (color cast) to them. As a professional photographer, I knew the problem revolved around the iPhone 4's auto white balance. However, with the iPhone camera there are no controls for this. It's factory set to auto white balance and there was definitely something horribly wrong with mine.

For the sake of doing a sanity check, I compared my new iPhone 4 to my iPhone 3GS and the difference was night and day. This problem also only seemed to affect the rear (5MP camera). Shots taken under the same lighting with the front camera were fine. As a matter of fact, the rear camera is fine too under natural light situations. The shots taken outside are gorgeous. No complaints there! 

I wasn't alone

My family bought four iPhone 4's (some from Apple, some from AT&T) on launch day. All four were having this problem. I went to Apple's Discussion Forums to see if others were having this problem and unfortunately there are dozens if not hundreds of users having this problem. I also saw an article on Macworld's website about the problem too. At first it appeared to be a problem with ALL iPhone 4s. However, after a little more digging I found people that were starting to chime in and saying that their iPhone 4's were fine. Even a few friends of mine said that they weren't having the problem. I wasn't quite convinced yet because unless you were shooting under the right conditions, you wouldn't notice the problem. It wasn't until someone on Apple's discussion forums posted side-by-side shots from two different iPhone 4's (one having the issue and one not having the issue) that I believed that this wasn't a problem that affected all iPhone 4s. This meant that I now had a decision to make. The decision was to either live with the problem until Apple fixes it via a software update or try for an exchange. The problem with an exchange is that some people in the forums had tried for exchanges (some as many as 6 times) and still hadn't got one that worked. I decided to wait for the July 16th press conference to see if Apple would even acknowledge the issue. While they did acknowledge the Proximity Sensor issue, unfortunately they didn't mention the white balance issue at all (and to this date, still haven't publicly said anything about it). I called AppleCare that afternoon and setup an advanced return. 

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