The study of thickness dependent properties of hot wall deposited cadmium selenide (CdSe) films will provide valuable insight in to the material characteristics, because of its multifaceted application. CdSe films prepared under various deposition techniques have been extensively investigated from the standpoint of various potential applications such as photo conductors, solar cells, thin film transistors, gas sensors, acousto optic devices, vidicons, photographic photoreceptors etc. [1–5]. Presently this material has become important because of interest in the optical devices where band gap modulation through alloying has been exploited. For any device application, a detailed knowledge of the dependence of the structural, optical, surface stability and dielectric parameters on thickness along with the deposition conditions is a must. Recently hot wall deposition method has gained importance due to its simplicity, economical viability, growth under thermodynamic equilibrium condition and its contribution for the growth of epitaxial films with smooth surfaces. Keeping above factors in mind CdSe films are deposited by hot wall technique and for first time a summary of various parameters like grain size (D), dislocation density (δ), strain (e), band gap (Eg), refractive index (n), extinction coefficient (k) , laser damage threshold energy density (α), dielectric constant (e′) and composition are determined and its dependence on thickness is presented here as a ready reference. The hot wall experimental setup used for CdSe (99.999%, Aldrich Chemical Co., USA) films preparation was the same as reported earlier [6]. The main feature of the system was the heated linear quartz tube (0.01 m diameter), which served to enclose and direct the vapor from the source to the substrate. The source, wall and substrates were heated independently. CdSe films were deposited on well cleaned glass substrates under a vacuum of 5 × 10−5 Torr with a vacuum coating unit (Hind Hivac 12A4 model, Bangalore). The source, wall and substrates are maintained around 1000 K, 900 K and 400 K respectively in order to get near stoichiometric films [7]. The structure of the films was analyzed using an X-ray diffractometer (Jeol 8030, using Cu Kα radiation with λ = 0.15418 nm). The composition analysis (EDAX) has been carried out on representative films using JSM 35 CF Jeol model SEM. Thicknesses of the films were determined by gravimet-