Sir Howard Stringer, Sony's first non-Japanese CEO, talked PS3 with The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg. The company has seen better days and is looking to the Welsh-born Stringer to turn things around.

When chewing the fat about The Da Vinci Code's success, the CEO pointed out that "It also beat Xbox 3 in Europe in its second weekend."

"You mean X-Men," Mossberg corrected.

Stringer started laughing and replied, "There's an obsession!"

The conversation shifted to the console war, and Mossberg through out this fairly innocuous question: "PS3 is going to be 500 bucks, right?"

The knighted CEO's response after the jump.

$499, and look it's got more bells and whistles than a 747... That Cell processor is extraordinarily powerful and you have nine hours of high definition on the Blu-ray disks alone. The reason it's expensive [is that] instead of concentrating on just the games player, which would have been done in the past, PlayStation 3 is designed to go somewhere else, where it's the center of the living room... It's part of the new digital strategy to try and create a new software mentality in Tokyo because because it's quite clear that we've been an analog company migrating to digital with some difficulty.

Wow, the PS3 with all the bells and whistles is $499? I thought it was $599 for the tricked out version and $499 for the "lesser" HDMI-free model. You know it's expensive when companies low ball pricing. Hey, Howie, don't avoid the issue. The PlayStation 3 is expensive. Suck it up, because I'm gonna have to when I shell out for one. Brian Ashcraft

Thanks, M!

More Here [WSJ]

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