An overview is presented of the characteristic features for the sandwich concept used for NLO crystal bulk absorption measurements. The sandwich concept is a photo-thermal absorption measurement concept based on the laser induced deflection (LID) technique. Besides a strong sensitivity enhancement for photo-thermally insensitive materials, the focus of the paper is on the absolute calibration, one of the key criteria for photo-thermal techniques. Based on experimental results it is proven that absolute bulk absorption calibration is simplified by using the sandwich concept since it is insensitive to sample orientation or dopants. Furthermore, experimental results on a variety of materials reveal that in general the bulk absorption calibration sample can be made of just one material, e.g. Aluminum which is favorable because of its easy mechanical handling. However, for surface/coating calibration a different result is found. Finally, the sandwich concept is applied to characterize the bulk absorption of different nonlinear crystals at the wavelengths 1064, 532, 355 and 266nm.