The PlayStation 3 will set European consumers back €499-€599 (£349-£419), a senior Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) executive has let slip. Sony is expected to announce worldwide pricing and other such details at an 8 May event the week before the E3 computer games trade show.

But in an interview with the Europe 1 radio station, and duly relayed by a variety of news sources, the head of SCEE's France operation, Georges Fornay, said he expects the price to fall within that range. It's not cheap, but then Sony Computer Entertainment chief Ken Kutaragi had already said the PS3 wouldn't be a low-cost console.

In an attempt to justify what will seem to many consumers to be a high price, Fornay said buyers won't just get a latest-generation games machine but an HD playback system with a Blu-ray Disc drive.

Indeed, with first-generation BD players set to be priced at between $1,000 (£570) and $1,800 (£1,026) when the come to market in the US, the PS3 starts to look less like a bad deal, and even the Euro to Dollar equivalent pricing, $612-735, indicates the PS3 will be the cheapest BD player by far.

That's rather more than Toshiba intends to charge for its basic HD DVD player, the HD-A1, though we'd expect the PS3 to cost less than that when it ships in the US in November. ®