The new Marine pattern is called MARPAT (Marine Pattern) and the Army's is ACU (Army Combat Uniform).
The reason that the digital patterns work well is because that's how the eye sees things, pixelated. The problem with the old patterns was TOO much black - no way you were going to pass off the old woodland pattern as "shadows".
The Marines stuck to the idea of having two patterns, one for woodland terrain and one for desert - both work well, the deserts work awesome. In country, I didn't notice any ACU's, mostly the old Somalia desert pattern for the Army guys. Then again, I don't remember when the Army finally made the ACU's official.
The Army decided to break away from the dual-pattern philosophy and went with one that (I agree with Wheeler) is guranteed to stick out in most every situation. I don't particularly care for the ACU's, but besides the color, that's mostly due to my personal loyalties (grin) and the fact that the Marines came up with the digitized pattern first..
The color of the fabric has as much - if not MORE - to do with the color of the reflected light. After all, color is just a certain frequency of wavelength of reflected light, while fabric changes a material's "ability" to reflect light.
In standard PASSIVE NVD's, black will not show up as white. However, using ACTIVE IR, darker colors will sometimes show up brighter than they are because of the way IR light is reflected. That said, I rarely use active IR in Gen3 NVDs. They work FINE with ambient light, and I used to drive with them
Besides, the IR light on your NVDs is only good for a few yards. Not much good unless you are in a dark room.
And, about the Urban cammies - those would actually work better for people like SWAT operatiors than always running around in black from head to toe. Think about it.