In this paper, a prototype for the progressive transmission of a color image is presented. The original image is segmented into multiple-resolution images by a pyramid structure; then the information for each layer is coded by lossless compression. The prototype consists of a server and a client. The server provides wavelet transform, color transform, storage, compressed wavelet coefficients and progressive transmission. In the client portion, by inverse wavelet and color transforms, the received wavelet coefficients are used to build successively-improving reconstructions of the image. The experimental results indicated that the required reconstruction time for each level is only 2 to 3 seconds. The prototype developed in this research can be practically implemented in commercial applications.