In this paper, we propose a subband pyramid image coding scheme that uses ECVQ (ntropy Constrained Vector Quantizer). In subband pyramid image coding, each subband can be encoded with a coder matched to the statistics of that particular subband, and available versions of the original image at different resolution are easily obtained. ECVQ, aiming at the minimization of the distortion for a fixed entropy of the quantizer output, is well combined with the subband pyramid image coding which yields high compression ratio and good image quality. The optimum bit allocation to each subbands corresponds to the points where the individual distortion rate curves are of particular slope, weighted to the number of samples in that subband, in designing ECVQ.