We propose a real-time image coding system, which is capable of adapting instanta-neously to the available channel bandwidth. The range of operational bandwidths for this system has a finer calibration than ordinary hierarchical vector quantization (HVQ) or wavelet based hierarchical vector quantization (WHVQ) methods suggested in the litera-ture.These properties make it very attractive for networks with fluctuating available band-width, like the internet. All encoder and decoder operations are strictly constant time per pixel, proceeding through table lookups, and are intrinsically suitable for parallel and hardware implementation.