In this paper we present an extensive study of amorphous silicon compensated materials, grown from a mixture of undiluted silane, hydrogen diluted phosphine and hydrogen diluted diborane. Two different compensation regimes were found. At low gas dopant concentration each dopant acts as a single dopant and compensation is achieved for the phosphine/diborane ratio equal to the inverse of their doping efficiency. At high gas dopant concentration, interaction of the two dopant species tends to equalize their doping efficiencies. A dark conductivity around 10(-11) Omega(-1) cm(-1), photosensitivity ratio under AM 1.5 of 6 orders of magnitude and defect density ranging from 8.5 x 10(15) to 1.5 x 10(17) cm(-3) were obtained. A decrease of photoconductivity with decreasing defect density has surprisingly been found in the as-grown samples, whereas during light-soaking samples with the lowest defect density degrade the fastest. These results suggest that the nature and kinetics of defects in compensated films are different from those of intrinsic materials.