This paper discusses an improved pyramid for spatially scalable video coding. We introduce additional update steps in the analysis and the synthesis of the Laplacian pyramid. Our pyramid is able to control efficiently the quantization noise energy in the reconstruction. Hence, it provides improved coding performance when compared to the standard Laplacian pyramid. Moreover, our pyramid does not require biorthogonal filters as they should be used for the frame reconstruction of the Laplacian pyramid. Therefore, low-pass filters can be chosen that suppress aliasing in the low-resolution images efficiently and, hence, permit efficient motion compensation. The experimental results demonstrate coding gains of up to 1 dB for both images and image sequences when compared to the standard Laplacian pyramid.