**3. Conclusions**

Laser deposition methods have been used to deposit a countless simple or complex inorganic or organic materials. It is quite hard to find other alternative methods that are so easily tunable so that they could produce thin films of so many different materials while preserving in the same time their structure and properties. This is probably the main reason for the endurance of these techniques despite some big outcomes: (i) droplets on film surface, which reduce their use in high tech fields and (ii) small area depositions that prevent their real breakthrough in industry.

Major progress has been achieved to overcome these issues, numerous droplet filters having been proposed in the literature with good results and large scale depositions of up to square metres being reported.

This chapter aimed to show for the new reader just a small part of the myriad of parameters that can be tuned and how important small adjustments can become for the final aspect and the properties of thin films. The combination of various parameters is practically limitless and new structures with interesting properties that emerge from these combinations provide a long life for the research in this field.

The authors hope that after reading this chapter, one will get an idea about the countless applications where laser ablation can be used, for synthesis, tuning or characterization of thin films. It is expected that new methods based on laser ablation will continue to emerge and develop as science progresses and applications become more and more punctual. Laserpatterned deposition of thin films or living cells transfer in a matrix by laser-induced forward transfer, compositional analysis of organic compounds by matrix-assisted laser desorption/ ionization are hot emerging fields that rotate around the laser ablation mechanisms.
