Extensive use was made of high-speed photography (interframe time 7 ?s) to study qualitatively the behaviour of solid discs of polymers at strain rates of 2.5 ??? 10^3 s^{-1} both at room temperature (300 K) and at 100 K. The framing speed was sufficiently fast to capture fracture initiation and subsequent failure of all the polymers studied, including polycarbonate (PC) which fails in an almost e