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A novel high-speed photopolarimeter is presented in this paper, which is composed by the optical system, electronics system and PC. This instrument uses a metallic grating that can produce both reflective diffraction and transmission diffraction as a beam splitter to divide the incident light into many components, and the light fluxes of the four 1st order diffracted beams are converted linearly into four electrical signals by four photodiodes. After going through a signal conditioning circuit, these electrical signals are converted into digital values by high-speed A/D converters that can implement synchronous multi-channels sampling, and then the data sampled are high-speedily transmitted into the PC via a USB2.0 interface. The electrical signal vector I composed by the four electrical signals possesses the linear relationship with the incident light Stokes vector S. The nonsingular instrument matrix A of this instrument can be obtained by the calibration, and then the unknown Stokes vector S of the incidence light can be obtained from the equation S = A−1I. The testing results show that the mean deviations of the measured Stokes parameters compared with the predicted values are less than 1% at 632.8nm. It is compact and easy to be installed, and can be used as a polarization state detector in real-time polarimetry and ellipsometry.