Abstract Evaporation and sputter deposition and a considerable number of technologically innovative variants of these basic processes are today available for thin film deposition by PVD. Particularly their reactive modes for stoichiometric compound film formation are important. In industrial film manufacture, however, only a limited but clearly growing number of them is in use. The reasons are mainly problems with economy and reliability. Ion and plasma processes with controlled kinetic particle energy of some tens of electron volts are often preferred in reactive evaporative deposition for densification of the layers and improvement in adherence, hardness, abrasion resistance and stoichiometry. Ion beam assisted deposition with various broad-beam ion sources, ion plating, particularly the reactive low-voltage ion plating process, and more recently plasma assisted evaporative coating techniques, as the advanced plasma source process are used mainly for the production of various environmental stable dielectric multilayer products in instrument optics and ophthalmics. For extremely low-loss film products as for instance durable, all-dielectric mirrors, ion beam sputtering is today the most advanced technology. In industrial film production standard bell jar and box coating plants are more and more replaced by modern fully automatic production systems which are designed exactly for the applied process including layer type and layer sequence, and the shape, size and number of the parts to be coated. High rate sputter technologies replace to an increasing degree the traditional evaporative deposition for metal mirror fabrication. New technological solutions as for instance the medium frequency powered twin-magnetron technique are available to overcome troubles in reactive mode DC-sputtering, so that reliable sputtering of dielectric films can be performed in production with improved manufacturing efficiency. Large area coating onto rigid substrates, e.g. for the production of transparent conductive films for liquid crystal display applications, and for the production of various architectural window coatings, is a domain for sputtering and advances assure that it will continue into the future.