Pixels (CSS) to Meters (px to m)

1 pixel (CSS) equals 0.0002645833333 meters (rounded).

1 pixel (CSS) = 0.0002645833333 meters

How to convert pixels (CSS) to meters

To convert pixels (CSS) to meters, multiply the number of pixels (CSS) by 0.0002645833333. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply meters by 3,779.527559 (rounded).

meters = pixels (CSS) × 0.0002645833333

Example: 10 pixels (CSS) = 0.002645833333 meters.

About these units

Pixel (CSS) (px)

Typography & screenCurrent unit

The CSS reference pixel, defined as 1/96 of an inch. Physical screens vary, but browsers use this value to convert pixels to print units.

Pixel is a contraction of picture element, itself built from pix, a 1930s shortening of pictures. The idea is older than the word: Paul Nipkow's 1888 German patent spoke of a Bildpunkt, or picture point, and the phrase picture element appears in US patents filed as early as 1911. Frederic C. Billingsley of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory published pixel in 1965, writing about scanned images from space probes to the Moon and Mars, and said he had learned it from Keith E. McFarland, who reported it was already in use around 1963.

A pixel in a photograph is a sample, not a fixed length, and screens vary widely in size. CSS therefore defines px as an abstract reference pixel of exactly 1/96 inch, based on the visual angle of one pixel on a 96 dpi device held at arm's length. The CSS specification gives that angle as about 0.0213 degrees for a nominal arm's length of 28 inches, which works out to about 0.26 mm. On sharper screens a single CSS pixel spans several device pixels. Earlier CSS versions did not fix the ratio, but too much existing content assumed 96 dpi.

1 pixel (CSS) = 0.0002645833333 meters (approximately).

Sources: W3C: CSS Values and Units Module Level 3, absolute lengths; Wikipedia: Pixel

Meter (m)

Metric (SI)Current unit

The SI base unit of length. Since 1983 it is defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.

Meter comes from the Greek metron, a measure. In 1791 the French National Assembly defined it as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle through Paris, after rejecting the length of a seconds pendulum because that length changes with local gravity. The surveyors Delambre and Méchain measured the meridian arc, and in 1799 a platinum bar known as the Mètre des Archives became the physical standard. NIST notes that this Earth-based meter turned out to be about 0.2 mm shorter than the true pole-to-equator fraction it was meant to represent.

The 1875 Treaty of the Meter created the CGPM and the BIPM to look after common standards, and in 1889 a platinum-iridium prototype bar took over; the original is still kept at the BIPM. In 1960 the meter was tied to 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of an orange-red krypton-86 line, and in 1983 to the speed of light, which made length a quantity derived from the time standard. The 2018 revision reworded that definition without changing the meter's size. NIST offers a handy yardstick for scale: a pace, meaning two steps, is roughly a meter or a yard.

The meter is the reference unit for length on this site.

Sources: BIPM: history of the metre; NIST: the meter and the SI redefinition; Wikipedia: Metre

Related conversions

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