A2 size in cm, inches and pixels

What A2 is good for

A2 is the size most people mean by a big print: it fills the space above a desk without taking the whole wall. It is large enough that brushwork and edge highlights stay visible from a normal standing distance, and small enough that an ordinary frame is easy to find and not expensive.

How the A series reaches A2

Start at A0, 841 × 1189 mm, and halve the long side twice. The first cut gives A1 at 594 × 841; the second gives A2 at 420 × 594. Each cut turns the old short side into the new long side without changing it. The halved side is the one that gets rounded: 841 halves to 420.5 and ISO 216 takes 420, which is why A2 is a whole number of millimetres and not quite half of A1.

The proportion itself is 1:√2. Ask which shape stays the same when you cut it in half and the algebra returns exactly one answer, which is where the number comes from. A2 covers 249,480 mm², which is precisely twice A3 and precisely four A4 sheets, tiled with no gap and no overlap. It is not precisely half A1, which surprises people: A1 comes to 499,554 mm² rather than the 498,960 two A2s cover, for the reason set out on the hub. Artwork laid out for A4 still enlarges to A2 on the same crop, which is worth knowing if you mean to print one image at two sizes.

Will your file carry A2?

Divide pixels by dpi and you have inches, so the pixel count a size needs falls straight out of its millimetres. A2 at 300 dpi comes to 4961 × 7016 pixels, about 35 megapixels. At 150 dpi it halves to 2480 × 3508, which most modern phone photographs clear comfortably.

Between those two numbers is where most decisions actually sit. A print hung above a desk is looked at from a metre or so, closer than a poster across a room, so A2 asks a little more of the file than its size alone suggests. If the source is a photograph of a painted model rather than a digital illustration, the limiting factor is usually focus rather than pixels. Our upload check measures the file and offers only the sizes it can carry, and the format guide explains what each surface does with the same image.

Living with an A2 print

An A2 sheet is 594 mm tall, so once it is framed it occupies roughly two thirds of a metre of wall. That is enough to be the thing a room is arranged around, and enough that getting the height wrong is noticeable. The usual approach is to set the middle of the picture at standing eye level rather than centring it in the space above the furniture, which tends to push prints higher than they want to be. If the piece is going above a painting desk you will be looking at it seated, so drop it accordingly. Off-the-shelf A2 frames need an exact size check when shopping in the US, and an A2 print is cheap enough to reframe later if the first choice is wrong.

Check the US product size

Compare the available sizes and prices before ordering. Free UK delivery is included in every price.

Size references

ISO 216 defines the A and B paper-size series. Inch conversions use NIST’s exact definition of one inch as 25.4 mm. These are reference sizes; compare the print sizes actually available before ordering.