Lately, there has been a sharp increase in the publication of papers on chemical bath deposition of CdS thin films and related materials due to successful results obtained using this method to fabricate CdS thin-film buffer layers for CuInSe2- and CdTe-based polycrystalline thin-film solar cells. Generally, these papers focus on previously proposed methods of studying film characteristics without a systematic study of the influence of deposition conditions on film characteristics. In this paper we present an exhaustive study of the chemical bath-deposited CdS thin films electro-optical properties dependence on deposition variables. We propose not only a set of conditions for obtaining CdS thin films by this method but additionally, suitable deposition process conditions for certain application requirements, such as buffer layers for thin-film solar cells. The observed electro-optical characteristics dependence on the deposition variables corroborates the chemical mechanism that we proposed previously for this process.