In this work several different strategies for image compression and progressive transmission are analyzed and evaluated. It will be shown that the simplest wavelet transform (Unitary Sequential Transform, UST) with a spatial predictor (U (S+ P) T) followed by the so-called Set Partitioning In Hierarchical Trees (SPIHT) coder is a very good lossless compressor providing compression rates similar to CALIC or LOCO-I. In addition, U (S+ P) T+ SPIHT is an optimal solution for image progressive transmission because the most relevant information is concentrated in a small amount of data.