A novel ultra-high vacuum chamber for growing films via pulsed laser deposition and studying the growth processes in situ using hard synchrotron radiation is presented. The chamber is mounted onto a 5-circle surface diffractometer and contains a large cylindrical-section beryllium window, which allows an extensive range of reciprocal space to be probed. The chamber is primarily used to perform surface diffraction measurements, for which much of the most valuable information derives from the weakest signals. With this in mind, we have employed a photon-counting area pixel detector system, which reduces data acquisition times by one to two orders of magnitude and concomitantly increases the potential volume of data that can be acquired for any given sample before the surface degrades due to surface contamination or radiation damage. Examples are presented of initial results obtained using this system. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.