Almost skipped over this one, at a glance I thought it was some kind of chunky transistor radio of the "Columbus" brand, but then I saw the buttons and the HITACHI, the Columbus is just some sticker.
This is a cool little mono tapecorder thingy. Very clean "leather" (?, I think it might be real) case, no smells. Who knows what I can do with this, I don't feel like powering it up, but as a tchotchke? Wonderful!
Oh and it was 8$. I think this thing is worth maybe 20-25$ + shipping, considering I got no accessories and the battery cover is missing, it's fair. You can't notice it's missing with the case on.
Tape was super expensive compared to vinyl for tape that sounded as good and while there were portable vinyl and reel-to-reel machines nobody was carrying one around with it on. At the time of the TC-50 the general consensus was that you couldn’t make a cassette that sounded as good as a reel-to-reel or vinyl because it would be too big. There were compromise formats like Elcaset and 8-Track, but they had their own fallings and were both quite large compared to compact cassette. It wasn’t until the middle of the 70s that the price and the quality of 1/4 in tape hit a place where it was able to start supplanting vinyl and larger reel-to-reel formats.
Cassette is 1/8 of an inch, reel to reel is 1/4 inch.
8-tracks are 1/4 in, reel-to-reel existed in several sizes.