People have already mentioned that how close to the surface the carbon layer is located is very important. The closer to the surface, the more you feel it, whereas if it is deeper, the blades feels a bit more like a pure wood. But there is another set of issues, mainly the weave pattern and whether other materials are present.
All of the composite materials used to make blades are made as fibers that are woven into sheets using computer-controllable machines. It is much the way cotton or wool is woven into a cloth. And that means there are many different weave patterns with different textures, thread counts etc. and therefore different properties. This gives rise to variations like Tamca carbon, Uniaxial carbon, Textreme, etc. etc. The weave pattern affects how the blade plays.
When carbon was first used in blades, there was an opinion by many that it could be hard to control and made blades too hard or a feel like "glass". (A bigger issue with 38 mm balls). So several manufacturers, especially Btfly, experimented with other materials, especially poly-aramide and related fibers like Kevlar and Vectran (another name for Arylate). Those materials are synthetic polymers of great strength, and are softer than carbon. One of their big effects was to absorb a lot of high frequency vibration. An early classic of this sort was the Butterfly Keyshot. But a lot of people found that the Arylate by itself was too slow and could give a blade that was a bit unpredictable. So Butterfly introduced blades in which the carbon and arylate fibers were woven together into a single sheet -- like a cotton/polyester blend in clothes -- and introduced this with the Iolite and Viscaria (I think those were the first ALC blades, certainly they were the first big sellers); and a few years later with Timo Boll Spirit and several others. That seemed to be perfect. Not too slow, not too soft. Bezt of both worlds. They have been making different versions of that blade ever since and people like them still, if anything their popularity has grown.
Later on manufacturers introduced Zylon, which is another material in the same general family as Arylate, but it feels a bit crisper and faster in blades. It is a lot more expensive. The first one of those was the Photino (zylon only) and of course they have ZLC blades (carbon-Zylon weave). The Super ZLC is the same material as ZLC but the weave pattern is different, I believe it is smaller fibers woven at higher density, and therefore more expensive still.
So this means there is really a huge variety of possibilities for blade construction with composite materials, and that is without even beginning to get into how the wood layers interact with all this. For example, among Butterfly ALC blade aficionados, there is difference of opinion on what is the best wood to use as the outer layer, all other things being equal. Also the thickness of the central wood core is crucial since this determines how flexible the blade is (at low frequencies of vibration). Even the first generation Butterfly ALC blades differ greatly in the central core; the Iolite had a much thicker central core than Viscaria and so was a lot stiffer and faster. That thick central core lives on today in the Garaydia.
I have focused on Btfly because I know their product line but for sure DHS has quite a few blades with very similar composite materials.
