Rainbow colored artifacts in photos taken with iPhone camera (iOS 17.4.1) AND black screen camera glitch

UPDATE: An senior Apple support specialist spent 45 minutes on the phone with me on May 20th and ran another diagnostic, which showed no hardware problems with my iPhone 14 Plus, even though the camera problems were constant. She convinced me to take advantage of my AppleCare coverage and just get a replacement phone, which arrived on May 23. I spent the usual 2 to 3 hours setting up the new 14 Plus and transferring all data and apps to it from my “old” phone, which I had bought new in Nov. 2023. I updated to iOS 17.5.1 (which had not been available before Thursday) on the new phone, and the camera works fine. No color artifacts in the photos.

Before I reset and wiped my old 14 Plus, on a whim, I updated it by installing iOS 17.5.1. The camera and photo problems went away instantly.

The publicity about iOS 17.5.1 mentions another photo problem that it fixed, but nothing about the camera problem. Do the Apple software engineers who work on updates to iOS 17 say nothing to the front line hardware / software support personnel?

Both of these camera problems went away immediately and completely - but temporarily - on May 14th when I installed the iOS 17.5 update on my iPhone 14 Plus. I had a recurrence of the black screen camera problem on the morning of May 15 and I made an appointment at the nearest Apple Store Genius Bar. The problem with the color patches or washes had not occurred again. At the Apple Store, the diagnostic that was run indicated no hardware problem of any kind. I have an Otterbox case on my iPhone, which I purchased new in Nov. 2023, and it is still under an AppleCare warranty. I have not dropped it.

Now, this morning (5-17-2024), the black screen problem with my main / front camera is occurring every time that I select the camera app, and the only way to cure it and to get the camera to work is to either shut down and restart the iPhone or to do a hard reset. After a hard reset, when the black screen recurs, I usually can get the front/main camera to view properly by changing the zoom ratio to 0.5. Further, every photo taken with the front camera has the color artifacts (see image).

The front camera problem is now worse than it was when I was running iOS 17.4.1 because then, the front camera worked to shoot video. Now, when I select video mode, the camera shows an out of focus screen and video cannot be shot.

There have been so many reports by users of the "black screen" camera problem -- and nearly all of them involving iOS 17.4.1 -- that it seems unlikely this is anything but a software problem. It would be helpful if Apple came clean officially about what it has investigated, what it knows, and what it is doing to fix the problem.