A new high‐speed digital framing camera is described. The design is built around a rotating polygon mirror that provides a framing rate of 24 000 frames/s. The camera electronics digitizes an image into a 32×104 grid of pixels, where the second dimension of the grid can be varied and is determined by the 8 bit computer‐aided measurement and control digitizer sampling rate. Available digitizer memory provides for 314 frames at this horizontal resolution. The advantages over other available high‐speed framing cameras are (1) low cost of the system provided the digitizers are available, (2) rapid retrieval of a recorded event, and (3) the ease with which the system can be used. Sample results from an application in high‐power arc photography are given to illustrate the system’s spatial and temporal resolution.