The work presents an application of two scanning optical techniques, i.e. optical prolometry and angle resolved scattering method. The rst method measures the light reected from a lm during scan of the surface, while the second method measures light intensity as a function of the scattering angle. The angle resolved scattering and optical prolometry measurements, being complementary to the atomic force microscopy, give information about surface topography. Scattered radiation measured by angle resolved scattering and optical prolometry is a function of height and slope of microfacets. The analysis of images allows to determine the most important statistic surface parameters, like roughness, height distribution and autocorrelation length, in large wavelength range by the determination of power spectral density function. The fast Fourier transform of angle resolved scattering and optical prolometry images permits to determine the distribution of surface features in the inverse space, such as periodicity and anisotropy. In this paper the results obtained for porous SiO2, SiO2TiO2 blends, TiN and polymer thin lms have been presented. The paper demonstrates the usefulness of the angle resolved scattering and optical prolometry for the surface and volume thin lm inspection.