Abstract The octree coding has been used extensively for 3D point cloud compression. For encoding, the recursive octree partition is used for the 3D point cloud frame until only one point is contained in the cube bin, and the representative bits are recorded. For decoding, the reversal procedure is performed to reconstruct the 3D point cloud frame. During the reconstruction, the reconstructed point in a particular bin is usually quantized to a particular corner of the bin for the reconstructed 3D point cloud frame; this introduces coding distortion in the point location. In this paper, nine reconstructed locations are tested to distinguish their distortion results, and the bit cost is also analyzed.