Compression ratio and computational complexity are two major factors for a successful image coder. By exploring the Laplacian distribution of the wavelet coefficients, a new bit plane entropy coder is proposed in this paper. Compared with the state-of-the-art JPEG2000 entropy coder (EBCOT), the proposed coder achieves a 0.75% better loss less performance for 5 level 5/3 wavelet decomposition at block size 64 £ 64 and 2.56% at block size 16 £ 16. Experimental results also show PSNR improvements of about 0.13dB at 1bpp and 0.25dB at 2bpp on average for lossy compression. However, the gain in coding performance is not based on increasing computational complexity but in stead a reduction by using a static arithmetic coder which avoids complicated adaptive procedure.