ZnO doped with some transitions metals (ZnO:M) has several significant potential application. ZnO:Co is proposed to be used in advanced spintronic devices due to its high Curie temperature and large magnetic moments per transition metal. ZnO:Cd has potential applications in short-wavelength optoelectronic devices. This work focuses on an ab-initio study of the electronic and optical properties of ZnO:M doped with Co, and Cd. Theoretical calculations have been done with different computational codes, using the density functional theory (DFT) at the GGA and GGA+U level. The latter introduces a Hubbard term correction in the "d" levels of the Zn and Co. We used different supercells in order to have different realistic dilution levels which can be achieved in experiments. Doping effects on the features of the optical absorption are also studied and analysed in this work. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.