How big is 1,000,000 pixels?
1,000,000 pixels is exactly one megapixel. Laid out as a square it’s 1000 × 1000. On a 96 ppi screen that square measures about 26 cm on each side. Printed at 300 ppi it shrinks to 8.5 cm — a beer mat. It is a smaller number than it sounds, and this page draws precisely that many, so you can look at it instead of imagining it.
Fair warning: this isn’t a megapixel calculator. It computes nothing for your camera. It’s one million pixels, drawn, with the arithmetic written next to them.
A million pixels, next to screens you know
Everything below is drawn at the same scale, one rendered pixel for every 13 source pixels. The gold square is the million.
A 4K screen holds 8.29 of these squares. An 8K one holds 33.18. The whole internet legend of 2005 fits, twice over, inside a single 1080p frame.
What one million pixels looks like on this board, right now
Those counters come out of the database on every request, and they include the bit most boards leave out: 7 of the 7 lines are ours, seeded at €0 and labelled “house” so nobody mistakes them for demand. 7 lines have actually been paid for, and rank #1 now costs €29. You can check every figure on the whole board.
The smallest purchase is 3 pixels, €3 — 0.0003% of a million. Drawn on the gold square above it would be a dot 0.05 px wide: invisible. That is exactly why the pixels here rank a line instead of colouring one: three pixels of picture are nothing, but three pixels of rank put you on a list people can read.
What resolution is 1 million pixels?
There is no single answer, because a million pixels is an area. Any width × height that multiplies out to 1,000,000 counts. Square it’s 1000×1000; in 4:3 the nearest familiar mode is 1152×864, which lands 4,672 pixels short and still gets sold as “1 megapixel”.
| Format | Pixels | MP | × a million | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| This board's stock Exactly one million — the number the whole idea is built on. | 1,000,000 | 1.00 | 1.00× | 1:1 |
| XGA+ (1152×864) The closest classic monitor mode to 1 MP — 4,672 pixels short. | 995,328 | 1.00 | 1.00× | 4:3 |
| Laptop HD (1366×768) The old default laptop panel. Just over a million. | 1,049,088 | 1.05 | 1.05× | 16:9 |
| SDXL / DALL·E square The default output of most image models. 48,576 pixels over. | 1,048,576 | 1.05 | 1.05× | 1:1 |
| Full HD (1920×1080) Twice the million, in one screen. | 2,073,600 | 2.07 | 2.07× | 16:9 |
| 4K UHD (3840×2160) Eight of them. | 8,294,400 | 8.29 | 8.29× | 16:9 |
| 8K UHD (7680×4320) Thirty-three of them. | 33,177,600 | 33.18 | 33.18× | 16:9 |
How big is it in centimetres?
Depends entirely on how tightly you pack the pixels. A pixel has no size until you pick a density, so “how big is a million pixels” only has an answer once you say at how many per inch. Take the 1000 px side of the square and divide.
| Density | Side (in) | Side (cm) | Roughly |
|---|---|---|---|
| 300 ppi — photo print | 3.33″ | 8.5 cm | The printing standard. A million pixels is a beer mat. |
| 200 ppi — decent print | 5.00″ | 12.7 cm | Fine if nobody puts their nose on it. |
| 150 ppi — poster viewed at arm’s length | 6.67″ | 16.9 cm | About a CD case. |
| 96 ppi — CSS reference screen | 10.42″ | 26.5 cm | Roughly a sheet of A4, minus the margins. |
Stored raw, one million pixels at 24 bits each is 3,000,000 bytes — 2.9 MB for a picture the size of a coaster. That is why JPEG exists.
Why anyone built a website out of a million pixels
Because the number is legible. In August 2005 Alex Tew, then 21 and about to start university, needed tuition money and picked a figure a headline could carry: a million pixels at a dollar each. He sold them in 10×10 blocks, auctioned the last 1,000 on eBay for $38,100, and finished at $1,037,100. Nobody bought pixels because a 10×10 block is a good ad. They bought them because the page was in the news that month.
Go and load the original now. It is untouched, and a good share of those links are dead — the domains lapsed, the startups folded, the pixels stayed exactly where they were put. That decay is the honest picture of what a pixel page is: not an ad channel, a fossil. This board will age the same way, and it is priced as a curio rather than as advertising. The longer version of that argument is on the how it works page, and the full history of Tew's page — the numbers, the auction, the link rot — is on the Million Dollar Homepage explainer.
Questions people actually type
How many megapixels is 1 million pixels?
One. A megapixel is a million pixels, so 1,000,000 pixels is exactly 1.0 MP. A camera sold as “1 MP” rarely hits the round number — 1152×864 gives 995,328 and 1280×800 gives 1,024,000. Both get called one megapixel.
What resolution is 1 million pixels?
There isn’t one — a million pixels is an area, and any width × height that multiplies to 1,000,000 qualifies. Square, it’s 1000×1000. At 4:3 the nearest standard mode is 1152×864; at 16:9 it’s roughly 1334×750.
How big is a 1 million pixel photo when printed?
8.5 × 8.5 cm at 300 ppi (3.3 inches), if the image is square. Drop to 150 ppi and it stretches to about 17 cm, with visible softness up close. One megapixel is a web image, not a print file.
Is 1 megapixel enough for anything today?
For a screen, often yes: a 1000 px wide image covers most blog widths and any phone. For printing, cropping or zooming, no — you run out of detail immediately. Phone cameras shoot 12 MP and up because the extra pixels are the crop budget.
What was the million pixel website?
The Million Dollar Homepage, put up in August 2005 by Alex Tew, a 21-year-old British student paying for university. He sold 1,000,000 pixels at $1 each in 10×10 blocks and raised $1,037,100. The page is still online, unchanged, twenty years later.
Can I buy pixels here?
Yes. €1 per pixel, minimum 3 pixels (€3), paid once through Stripe, no account. Here a pixel is a point of rank rather than a square of image: the listing owning the most pixels sits at the top of the board. It will not bring you much traffic — every listing publishes its real cost per click so you can check that before paying — and the pixels are permanent.