Quick! What brightness level is this code running at? 
(screw you google, this is a 15s video, why are you still processing?)
For extra entertainment while I’m waiting on answers (and before spilling the beans 
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkMPZ7WeDck&feature=youtu.be&t=2m36s
As much as I like Jason’s answer, I think John’s got it pretty close, as it’s dark and the LED’s aren’t blasting at the camera.
Both of them.
Ding ding ding! we have a winner… Assuming that is, that @Robert_Atkins meant “2”
(Because of the math involved, a brightness of 1 would have resulted in all the leds being off
I’ll bet 1, just like on the price is right.
If it was 1, then the leds would all be off. (It’s a side effect of how we do scaling. Fixing it, however, would turn scale8 from a deterministic 4 clock cycles on AVR into 3 or 6 clock cycles - we opted for deterministic & faster for the time being, but may revisit that in the future, especially as people move to arm).
so the fades are a result of temporal dithering? Is it cause the APA 102 allows much faster framerates that you can do this?
Yeah - you can do it with ws2812’s as well, but you are capped at 400Hz as an update rate and you can really only get that if your strips are short (eg under 60 LEDs)
I was actually trying to be clever, thinking it might be a combination of FastLED’s dithering and the APA102’s built-in brightness management. But I’ll take it
@Robert_Atkins It’s better to be lucky, than good.
How does full brightness of the APA102C compare with the ws2812b? Is it the same led in that way? In the datasheet of the APA102 (the different package) they’ve put higher candala features: https://cpldcpu.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/apa-102-super-led-specifications-2013-en.pdf
However the datasheet doesn’t seems correct overal (both show the same package drawing, which is simple not true).
It’s not quite higher - either. The APA102 is listed as 500-650 for Red, 370-530 for green, and 120-165 for blue, the APA102C is 300-300 for Red, 420-460 for green, and 160-180 for blue.
So the APA-102C is bright on the blue, but dimmer on red and green. The APA-102C also appears to have much tighter constraints on the range of values for the leds - more likely to have uniform coloring? Not entirely sure what’s up there.
The strip from the pixel pusher folks appears to be the APA-102, while the strip that I got from ali-express is the APA-102C.
As for comparing brightness - I don’t have a great setup for that here (I tend to not care about brightness - if anything, it’s rare that I run anything at over 128-192 these days - leds, left to their own devices are just too damn bright!
The APA102 is quit hard to find on a strip, most cary the APA102C. Since the price for the APA102 is around 80% higher then the APA102C I was curious if you see a lot of difference (with the eye). The heat dispensation can be interesting as well (I want to build it in a tight enclosure).
APA-102 source - http://illumn.com/pixelpusher-and-led-strips/pixelpusher-strip-betterpixel-72-ip67.html - tomorrow i’ll try to set up the two strips side by side and compare the output.
Ya know, the more I look into the apa102’s, there is a greater advantage in using them for custom projects. You don’t need any extra components to use these leds. Compare that to the ws2812’s with the little cap sitting next to them on strips.
@Daniel_Garcia , did you ever get to comparing the APA102 to the APA102C directly? Notice any differences?