In last year's hotly contested , we rated the black iPhone 4 as having the best camera overall among smartphones at that time.

We were eager to see if the white iPhone 4 had the same photography chops; now that it's here, we ran it through the same image-quality tests as its predecessor. Here's the shocker: Based on PCWorld Labs' standardized image- and video-quality testing, the different flavors of iPhone 4 produce slightly different flavors of photos and video.

The differences are most dramatic when using each camera's flash to snap portraits. The white iPhone 4 produced noticeably different skin tones and color depth with the flash enabled than the black version of the same phone. On the video side, the white iPhone 4 produced slightly sharper footage, with better contrast and brighter colors in low-light situations.

This doesn't necessarily mean that the camera's lenses and sensors are different. The white iPhone 4's flash may illuminate subjects differently due to reflection off the phone's bright backside; the software responsible for adjusting white balance and exposure settings may be optimized for one iPhone's flash photos but not the other; the difference in camera module construction may have noticeable results in the images; or it might just be that the two test phones we used were built differently. But for what it's worth, our tests showed differences between the two iPhone 4 cameras.

To gauge how differently each iPhone 4 camera's images looked, we snapped test shots with a white iPhone 4 and a black iPhone 4, both loaded with iOS 4.3.3 firmware. We printed out unmarked sample images shot in our standard lab-testing environment for photo quality and showed them to a panel of seven editors. Five of the seven editors said that the test shots taken with the white iPhone and those taken with the black iPhone looked as if they had been shot with different cameras. Of the remaining two editors, one said that the test shots looked as if they might have been taken at different flash intensities, and the other said that in-phone image-processing software might have been handling the images differently.