Though I love my PDW-F335, one thing that always bugs me is the color bars it has.

Do the rest of you like the multibars style color bars that it has? I don't see why they didn't include regular SMPTE bars. The multibars don't have normal pluge for setting brightness and the colors don't line up properly to check them in blue gun mode or with a blue filter for color/tint settings. I really don't see what the advantage of this style bars is, is there one?

Sure, they give the choice of full field bars, but that doesn't do any of the above, either.

I really wish they would add regular SMPTE bars in a firmware update.

You can select the type of bars you have in the Camera Config page of the menu under the maintenance section. Doh read your message again, see you know you can select other bars.

The Smtpe HD Bars as generated by the F355 do have pluge, it is below the red bar, the right most bar should be barely visible on a correctly set monitor. and the left 2 bars should be black as these represent saturated black (middle) and blacker than saturated black (left). You should be able to setup blue gun using the white, cyan and blue bars.

I know there is a pluge there, but the style is different from what I'm expecting. What you describe sounds like the pluge for SMPTE NTSC with the three blacks, but this SMPTE HD has five blacks. Unless there are really three with spacers set at 0 IRE in the SMPTE HD bars? If that is the case, the middle one is higher than I would think it should be at 1 IRE on my scope. I would think the middle one should be right at 0 IRE. The pluge bars I see on the scope show -2,0,1,0,4 versus the -4,0,4 I'm used to seeing from SMPTE NTSC bars.

As for the colors, what I mean is that most of the sub-bars are missing. There's now the very wide gray sub-bar that one can match to the blue bar, but the rest are gone. No cyan sub-bar under magenta, no magenta sub-bar under cyan, no blue sub-bar under gray. Having the colors you are trying to match in blue gun mode physically against each other is important, IMHO, verus just looking at them independently on the screen.