I love how, if you do view it accurately, it just makes every other white look washed out and grey in comparison. Our visual system is just one big comparison machine.
It's really striking if you have a projector. Before you turn on a projector in a room that isn't dark, a white wall looks pretty white. Once the projector is on, that "pretty white" wall is now playing the role of black in the projected scene.
This is actually super interesting: for displays that can get bright enough for HDR content, but do not have self-illuminated pixels/local dimming zones/any other mechanism to display very dark content alongside very bright (like, say, most modern iPad and Mac screens), this is exactly what is happening.
macOS/iPadOS cranks the backlight brightness up but then adds a black filter to the non-bright content to sim it back to “normal” levels.
Yeah, it seems to auto-dim the "SDR" brightness range a bit too much; the jump in the white background brightness ends up being clearly noticeable when e.g. I'm switching to an from the superbright QR code tab in the browser
Next time you see a scene in a movie where people enter a house and you can see both the interior and exterior, think about the 1000x ratio and how much artificial light was needed inside the house to balance the lighting in the shot. (Assuming it's a real sunlit exterior and not a sound stage, of course.)
In the modern digital era, that has actually changed quite a bit. Now cameras are really sensitive – the equivalent of what used to be 2500 to 4000 ISO is now really common – so instead of adding light, often you have to flag off light in areas you want dark.
So instead of many bright lights you just have duvetyne and flags everywhere, which many DoPs have complained is harder to work with.
A stop is double the amount of light. Useful for equivalence across different ways of changing exposure. So I halve my shutter speed I’ve lost a stop. But I increase my aperture from 4 to 2.8 I’ve gained that stop back. Or I double the sensitivity of my film or sensor (eg. iso 400 to 800).
So yes, in terms of data if using linear gamma exactly equivalent to bits. This is why log gamma curves are used to store for eg 16 stops of light info in 12 bit format
Imagine light represented as a floating point number of the type a * 2 ^ b
Stops describes the range of the exponent b.
With a typical cinema camera, max_b > min_b + 14
You can use tricks like gradient ND filters to increase the perceived range within of a frame or variable NDs to slowly adjust over time (like our eyes do)