I tried opening the image, but it made my entire laptop unresponsive[1]. So let's hope the graphics manufacturers catch up with the pixel trent before those 8K monitors become mainstream.

[1] On Chrome for MacOS. Granted my macbook is a couple years old, and the Apple graphics drivers are garbage.

Try firefox, it has an integrated decoder-downscaler, i.e. it never has to keep the full-size image in memory before downscaling to the target resolution. But that does not help if you zoom to 1:1.

My laptop is very much bog standard, but gimp had no problem loading it. Generally this may more come down to software implementation, rather than drivers

I don't have too great a desktop (i5 from more than 4 years ago (launch date was apparently 2011) and 16 gigs with more than half already used, no graphics card) and I could open the 291M file just fine in viewnior.

I was able to zoom in on the full resolution. Granted, it wasn't snappy, but not unbearable either. I'm on a 2013 13" retina and current Chrome.

If you have an nvidia card in your Mac, they make drivers available which work well.

I do have an nvidia card, but since MacOS 10.14 the nvidia driver manager reports that my driver (387.10.10.10.40.105) is not compatible with my OS, and it also reports that there are no newer drivers available when using the update function. So I'm currently back at the default Apple driver.

I have ran the nvidia driver before MacOS 10.14, and it did feel slightly faster than the driver supplied by Apple. I doubt if it will improve opening an 8K*8K image in a browser though...

By then your eyesight might have deteriorated. ;-)

Is it just me or are 4k monitors running in 1080p worse than straight 1080p monitors?

Yes, since neither GPU drivers nor most displays currently support integer scaling. See http://tanalin.com/en/articles/lossless-scaling/ for more a more in-depth explanation.

Fascinating. I assumed that an even multiple is all you need to ensure crispness.

I mean would the display need to know - just GPU drivers should be able to send a 4k signal that has 4px squares each of one colour? Interesting though.

It doesn't need to, but it would suffice in case your GPU doesn't manage.

Well they're usually bigger. IMHO 1080p for monitors maxes out at about 22-24" before it starts to look blurry, after that you want 1440p, until about 28", which is when 4k starts to make sense.

You may need "font smoothing" enabled.

Of course it's worse, since you have more pixels than image data.

By that logic Apple's Retina displays would be worse than non-Retina displays. Down-sampling decreases eye strain and makes the image smoother. It is only an issue when dealing with fine lines that our eyes watch very closely, such as in text.

If you turn your apple retina display to 1080p mode, then I would think it's not that good when there's a 1:1 correspondence between physical pixels and pixel data. However when the size stays the same, I wouldn't expect much difference.

A 32 inch 4k display downsampled to 1080p, well... :)

A down-sampled image has less noise than an image in its native resolution. You can experiment on your own monitors if you don't believe the theory, just remember to use font smoothing for non-native resolutions. You can also ask about it on the appropriate stack exchange, it is a frequent topic of confusion.

This is one of the advantages of shooting at a higher resolution than the intended target delivery resolution. When downscaling an image, the noise gets 'averaged' out of the image. For HD 1920x10280, a 2.7K resolution was a good choice before having to jump all the way to 4K. There's other technical reasons as well for shooting larger than intended use, but just re-enforcing the 'noise removal' process of downscaling an image.

depends on the density - if both monitors are the same physical size, there should be no difference.