A CD recorder is a compact disc drive that can be used to produce discs readable in other CD-ROM drives and audio CD players.
A DVD recorder produces DVD discs playable in stand-alone video players or DVD-ROM drives. ("DVD recorder" may also refer not just to the drive unit, but also to consumer set-top devices which record video onto DVD media.)
A Blu-ray disc recorder produces BDs playable in BD-ROM drives.
Optical disc recorders are generally used for small-scale archival or data exchange, being slower and more materially expensive than the moulding process used to mass-manufacture pressed discs. Nevertheless, they (along with flash memory) have displaced floppy disks and magnetic tape in most cases because of the low cost of optical media and the near-ubiquity of optical drives in computers and consumer entertainment hardware.
