Well, mr anonymous, noone is asking you to buy
them, and as you give them so less credit seems
that you wouldn't purchase them even if they cost
a couple of bucks.

With that said, now think this, test cels, as well
as hanken cels are designed for an special
pourpouse that is different for the use in the
making proces of the series/movie itself. They are
used as design for posters, wallscrolls,
pencilboards, cd/dvd covers and much more other
things. For that reason, these kind of cels most
of the times have much more quality than normal
production cels. In addition to that, with these
kind of cels there's really only one of a kind, i
mean, with production cels many times a sequence
has several cels that even being different are
similar, and not all of them are done by key
animators. But with test/hanken cels is different.
That's why ussually these kind of cels are quite
expensive.

As for the 'not even painted' matter, well, let me
tell you that it doesn't matter that much,
sketches are ussually also not painted and that
doesn't take anything from it's value.

At the end, the offer/demand is what rules over
prices. If they are expensive is because there are
many people willing to pay that much for them.

AS for this thread, i guess you are most probably
talking about the last update of animechaos. There
were many nice X test cels there, and for your
info, those test cels were used in the design
process of the booklet of one of the movie cds. Go
to the animechaos forum and take a look by
yourself to some pics of the covers and tell me if
owning the original cel used for one of those
covers doesn't deserve the same value than a cel
used for the actual movie.