A novel principle of a high-speed 3-D camera is presented. This 3-D camera system is able to achieve the instantaneous full-frame 3-D imaging capabilities that no other commercially available 3-D image acquisition systems or 3-D rangefinders can currently achieve. There are no mechanical moving parts in this system, therefore the mechanical design can be very simple and reliable, and there is no ''eye-safe'' problem. The 3-D camera can be integrated using all off-the-shelf products, which leads to a very low production cost and short development period. The 3-D camera is also able to provide normal 2-D intensity image of the scene using a single camera, which will greatly facilitate the object recognition and the sensor fusion tasks in machine vision applications. Simulations and hardware experiments have been performed, and the results are presented.