Detailed Comparison of High Speed Voltage Level Shifting:
I finally got my hands on some SN74HCT245N ICs and put them up against an SK9822 for voltage Level Shifting.
I have an esp8266 set up to transmit data at diferent rates. The top 5 screenshots use a single SK9822 pixel. The bottom screenshots use the SN74HCT245N. I tested 1Mhz, 5Mhz, 10Mhz, 15Mhz & 20Mhz. Asside from my shitty Rigol oscilloscopes wonky waveforms, you can see a major difference in voltage levels(highlighted in RED) .
The SK9822 pixel is consistently over 4.5V BUT at 15Mhz and UP drops to 4.4 and 3.7(which is useless)
The SN74HCT245N is consistently between 5.3-5.3V!!
I’m sure this is common knowledge to all, but i wanted to show the wave forms for future beginners.
Great work, thanks for sharing your results! I need to get a scope and test the smaller four channel SN74HCT125N chips I’ve started using. They seem fine, but it’d be good to test.
@Jason_Coon Thanks mate, yeah for sure test everything and post results. Before running this test, i didn’t think a null pixel would perform so poorly, explains a lot of things
Oh super @Leon_Yuhanov , excellent to actually get it on a scope and do these tests. Thank you for posting.
Maybe @Jason_Coon will mail you one of those smaller chips he’s trying. Much easier then you mailing your scope to him. 
It’s great to see this. I knew the “ghost pixel” repeater trick couldn’t reach as far as a proper CMOS buffer, but it’s nice to see it visualised.
Although I have to say, the lack of a consistent voltage scale (and the differences in timescale between identically-clocked outputs) makes the charts a little tricky to compare visually.