This paper describes the effect of the stylus tip size on the shape error in surface topography measurement. To analyze the distortional effect of an actual surface geometry origination from the finite stylus size, the surface is modeled as a sinusoid and the stylus tip as a circle. The magnitude of this distortion is defined as the ration of standard deviation, and this is expressed as an analytic function of the stylus tip radius and the geometrical parameter of a sinusoid. In this paper, the spectrum analysis of the profile is applied to investigate the distortional effect due to the mechanical filtering of the stylus in the frequency domain. and, the cumulative power spectrum is proposed to assess the shape error of measured data according to the various stylus tip sizes. From these results, a new method to select proper stylus tip radius is proposed.