Abstract: A method of driving a solid-state image pickup device includes steps of using vertical charge-coupled devices each having a pixel section and a vacant packet section to fetch all the electric charges stored in photoelectric conversion elements to the pixel sections of the vertical charge-coupled devices, feeding vacant packets into the vertical charge-coupled devices from a horizontal charge-coupled device at every N-th row, thereby dispersing the vacant packets while transferring the electric charges to the lowermost row of the vacant packet section, feeding the vacant packets corresponding to one row to the vertical charge-coupled devices from the horizontal charge-coupled device during only a horizontal blanking period of each horizontal period to thereby cause the vacant packets to be transferred upwardly along the vertical charge-coupled devices by M rows (where M<N), while during a horizontal scanning period, the transfer along the vertical charge-coupled devices is interrupted and the electric charg