I wanted to buy this one. I am not a collector, just wanted to get a piece of nostalgia. I used to own GF777 in 1980s but it is so big it would not fit anywhere in our house without some special arrangements. So I thought something smaller would work better for me. When i first saw this 9696 the bid was at $3xx. I was not watching any ebay actions lately so I did not know what to expect. I thought it might go up to $600. Today I placed a bid at 5xx and then the madness started. I was ready to go higher but when the price went above 1000 I started "questioning myself". The problem was I never saw this particular model and not being a collector I really did not know if this price made any sense. I stopped at $1300 and, obviously, didnot win

I am not sure if this is a bad thing though. 9696 seems to be a nice item but maybe not $1500 nice. If I understand ebay info correctly the person who won the auction already bought more than 1000 items from ebay which indicates that s/he is probably doing it for profit.