ieee488:
I don't go buying things from eBay in the Netherlands.
Like I said, nothing in the Netherlands. It's just the Dutch eBay. Replace the .nl with .com and it will be nicely in English. All sellers are in China (as usual).
ieee488:
it looks like the products are deprecated.
Explain yourself? The pure RGB strips are still commonly used. If you just want to light large areas you don't need individual control over each pixel. Like I said, still the most sold strip. And if you change your expectation that a RGB led comes with a controller/driver listings are not weird. You don't expect a normal 3mm led to come with a driver, do you?
ieee488:
You guys could do people a favor if you actually created one page that describes these different LED strips.
The FastLed website already shows a lot of different types of individual controllers. And like I said, most of use don't expect any controller in a strip so it's just multiple leds on a strip with resistors which you drive like any other led 
ieee488:
My point is that it is not readily apparent to the casual buyer that there are 4(!) types of RGB LED strips as you and Grumpy_Mike claim show ;).
Maybe even more. It just started with the plain strips and manufacturers just thought of nice control chips and even integrated them into the led package itself. And like every industry, every manufacturer tries to get a share of the pie with there own implementation which is or is not compatible with others.
ieee488:
All confusing and not very clear that they are actually different - it may be that the Chinese sellers are not right with descriptions.
Most mention the controller just fine or at least the "general" brand name which they are compatible with. And the once without yeah, like I said, you don't expect a seller to tell you when you buy a regular LED it has no controller?
ieee488:
I still stand by my comments that when people are posting here about RGB LEDs, they are referring to the non-Adafruit variety and are ones with the included controller and that run on 5V different colors at the same.
A lot of people indeed do but that's what makes it confusing. A real engineer would not and will ask just to be sure around here 
ieee488:
Those are the ones I see most commonly on eBay.com
maybe in the US, in China the controller-less variants are still the most popular
ieee488:
The analog stuff is deprecated. One color at a time. Ugh.
Not everybody likes a rainbow on there ceiling And your free to make sections again. It's still a heck of a lot cheaper and easier to make sections of 1m with a individual controller if you want a long run and it will also look nice. Yes, individual pixels is nice but I don't think it's worth a tenfold to just light my room.