80 percent of launch PS3s will be the $599 premium model

Sony PlayStation 3Sony said a week ago that they’d have only 400,000 PS3s available during the American launch of the console. That might be around 74,000 more than the 326,000 Xbox 360s that were sold in the five days after that console went on sale, but we all know those were hard to get for months.

Gamespot was wondering how many of those PlayStation 3s would be the $599 premium model, which comes with a 60GB hard drive and HDMI high-definition video output, and how many would be the $499 model, which sports only a 20GB hard drive. Lazard Capital Markets analyst Colin Sebastian gave an estimate: “The split between premium (60GB) and core (20GB) units at US retail stores should be roughly 80% and 20%”

He also reports that Sony plans “to ship another 800,000 units via air freight through the end of the year, that’s 1.2 million units total in calendar year 2006 [to America].” I guess it makes sense since whatever they ship this year, they’ll sell to PlayStation fans or Blu-ray/technology aficionados anyway, just like the Xbox 360 did for itself end 2005.