This paper proposes a new mesh simplification algorithm using differential error metric. Many simplification algorithms make use of a distance error metric, but it is hard to measure an accurate geometric error for the high-curvature region even though it has a small distance error measured in distance error metric. This paper proposes a new differential error metric that results in unifying a distance metric and its first and second order differentials, which become tangent vector and curvature metric. Since discrete surfaces may be considered as piecewise linear approximation of unknown smooth surfaces, theses differentials can be estimated and we can construct new concept of differential error metric for discrete surfaces with them. For our simplification algorithm based on iterative edge collapses, this differential error metric can assign the new vertex position maintaining the geometry of an original appearance. In this paper, we clearly show that our simplified results have better quality and smaller geometry error than others.