Tech Guide: Buying a CD/DVD burner

A CD burner, which connects to your computer, can both play and create CDs. DVD burners, on the other hand, are a bit more advanced and can both play and create CDs and DVDs. With a burner, discs are loaded and unloaded via a sliding tray, and they're read using a laser, just like in your CD or DVD player. The laser shines on the reflective inner layer of a disc, detecting differences that are patterned to represent data. But unlike a regular CD or DVD player, a burner's laser can also create -- or burn -- these data marks.

Still, you can't just stick an old Michael Bolton CD into a burner and write over it (much as you might want to). Burners use a few different kinds of discs, each for a slightly different task. A DVD burner can read CD-ROMs, such as a store-bought music CD, and DVD-Videos, such as your store-bought copy of Toy Story. A DVD burner can also read and write data on a CD-R disc -- the R stands for recordable -- as well as on DVD-R and DVD+R discs (don't worry, we'll explain the differences between -R and +R later). Additionally, most CD and DVD burners can also read and write data on rewritable discs, which you can rewrite over and over again (about 1,000 times); a rewritable CD is referred to as a CD-RW, and rewritable DVDs come in a few formats, including DVD+RW, DVD-RW, and DVD-RAM.

In this guide, we'll concentrate primarily on DVD burners. Why? All DVD burners can burn CDs, but CD-only burners won't burn or even play DVD media of any kind. Furthermore, DVD burners have become so affordable that there are fewer reasons to buy a CD-only burner.