Image coding is one of the most visible applications of wavelets. There has been an increasing number of reports each year since the late 1980s on the design of new wavelet coders and variations to existing ones. In this paper, we report some results from our comparative study of wavelet image coders using a perception-based, quantitative picture quality scale as the distortion measure. Coders are evaluated in rate-distortion sense; the influences of different wavelets, quantizers, and encoders are assessed individually. Our results provide an insight into the design issues of optimizing wavelet coders, as well as a good reference for application developers to choose from an increasingly large family of wavelet coders for their applications.