Sorry to ask this question but I haven’t seen it asked before: is there any downside to buy the black stripes of WS2812b? Procuring them in my country is might hard and expensive. I’ve found 4m of 144 WS2812b, but the PVC is black. Is really a downside?
The downside is that they absorb light from the diffusion. Some light will be directed back from the diffusion layers in your blade, and if you have black strips, that light will be absorbed. If your strip is white that light will be mostly reflected back. I’m not really sure how much of a difference it makes though. It might be very little. Perhaps someone else have first-hand experience and can tell us how much of a difference it makes?
Heys, I think any experience would trump all theory. Worst case scenario, I buy one and just do a test on a testing blade and that’s it.
That is generally true, but brightness is actually quite difficult to measure in an accurate and unbiased way. Even if you do this experiment, the results are likely to be pretty subjective.
@profezzorn hit the reply first. The black strip tends to absorb versus help to diffuse and reflect the light and in the case use we have it causes really bad side stripes and corncob in the blade. I didn’t take an image at the time but put it this way, it’s like comparing a standard strip at half-power to a pixel stick except it’s worse than both.
They are cool for ceiling, panel-prop, and backlighting saber stands because the light plays different. 
I guess that for chassis and bladeplug use they are good, then.
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The smaller ones for sure. I keep meaning to finally buy a strip to do an infinity mirror clock. 