Workstation Interpretation - a Comparison of Data Stored at 8 and 16-Bit

On receipt of a new seismic survey, the geophysicist has several decisions to make before loading the data to a workstation for interpretation. He or she must decide on the: areal extent to be loaded; in-line and cross-line spacing (e.g. 12.5 or 25m); time window; sample rate (e.g. 2 or 4ms) and sample precision (e.g. 8 or 16 bit). The decisions made will affect disk space requirements and time taken to retrieve data from disk, transfer across any network and display on the workstation. For a large 3D survey such decisions could have significant impact on the cost of storing the data and the time taken to interpret the survey.