iPhone 4S front-facing camera flickering

I am having this same issue. It doesn't do it all the time. Usually when I first open up the camera, and it's only with the front facing camera. I usually have to keep switching back and forth between the front and rear camera before it starts working properly, or I have to close the camera app and reopen it and see if it's working then. It's really annoying. I've already had my first 4s replaced b/c of an annoying echo everytime I made calls, and now this just started happening. Let me know if you figure this out.

Exactly the same with my 4S front camera. Flickering, going black, distortions. My initial thought was that it might be rekated to the automatic shutter since the problem seemed to respond to changes in light levels in the frame, that is in low artificial light. Haven't yet tested this in other situations, though.

Mine seems to be having the same problem. The front lens is very sensitive to light. If it gets bright, the camera goes black with static lines or it flickers. It would freeze and crash. The only help is to click the album icon on the lower left then you have to start the whole picture taking all over again. And I don't like that, I wanna have a phone that has no problems like this since my white 32gb iphone 4s is just 17 days old. I'm gonna go take a trip to the apple store to see what's up.

Same problem with my two month old iphone 4s - camera freezing on the closed shutter. The first few times a soft reset fixed it but today it freezes on a closed shutter and I've not been able to correct it. Before it froze completely, over the last couple days, it was behaving strangely - sensitive to light same as applefiend mentioned above.

I've tried soft reset (reboot), deleting pics from photo album (currently have about 413 pics and a few videos and 3.3 GB still available on my 16gb phone) and decreasing my iCloud storage and turned off my iCloud backup and Photostream and deleted Photostream (now have 1.2 gb free of 5 gb), in case it was storage issues, but that hasn't helped. Software is up-to-date. I'm going to contact Apple and see if they suggest trying a hard reset/restore. I use it daily to take pics for personal/business so this *****!

Since the above message, I've tried the following solutions suggested from various forum posts, none of which worked:

checked the restriction settings on my iphone for my camera per dbaz' forum post below.

uninstalled Skype and two other wifi-talk apps, and did a soft reset (power off and back on)

Did a restore and restored to last iCloud backup (see this youtube video for doing a restore on iPhone).

None worked, camera is still frozen with shutter closed.

Going to try and reset and reset as a new iPhone as a last resort, and then if that doesn't work, I'm off to the Apple store. From what I've read in other threads, it seems to be a hardware issue and not a software issue.

-----------------

Forum posts from other threads....

"dbaz

UPDATE: II was having same problem with my camera this fixed mine....

check to make sure that Restrictions are not turned on by tapping Settings > General > Restrictions. If they are, set Allow Camera to ON or tap Disable Restrictions (in iPhone 2.1 software or later)."

- CHECKED MY RESTRICTION SETTINGS, BUT ALLOW>CAMERA SETTINGS WERE ALREADY "ON", SO THIS DID NOT WORK FOR ME.

"rliu

My company just gave me the 4S phone and try using the camera after I installed Skype. Then the same issue happen on this discussion. The phone camera froze on the shutter screen, cannot try switching between video and camera did not work. Try doing a full-power shutdown, holding the power-lock button for five seconds, slide to power off. This did not work.

Then, the only 3rd party application that I installed on the phone was Skype. After installing Skype, I was testing the video camera with my friends. Seems to work fine from Skype. However, after about a two day of use and decide to use the camera. The camera just shows the shutter screen and cannot get the screen off.

On my case, it was definitely a software issue.

So my action was to remove Skype, did a full-power down. Then the camera is working again. My suggestion is that any 3rd application that you install, try to test the default applications and make sure it is working."

TRIED REMOVING SKYPE & 2 OTHER TALK-VIA-WIFI TYPE APPS, THEN POWER DOWN, POWER UP - DID NOT WORK FOR ME