Cadmium sulfide thin film was grown by shallow chemical bath deposition technique. This technique used a highly conducted hot plate to heat the substrate, while using a shallow bath for higher thermal gradients. As a result, large area uniformity could be achieved and the homogeneous nucleation was suppressed. More importantly, the solution used was greatly reduced, which is crucial for cost reduction in practice. The effects of temperature and shaking on the growth kinetics and film properties were investigated. The reaction activation energy was obtained to be 0.84 eV, and was not affected much by shaking indicating that the deposition is essentially reaction controlled. Furthermore, the films deposited at low or high temperature conditions had better photoconductivity. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.