16:9 cheap trick?

[lgh529]

I was reading in the DVDLab manual and it talks about a cheap trick for 16:9 work from a MiniDV camera on page 33:

A neat trick may be to add a wide conversion lens (0.7 or so) to the camera to enlarge the field of view of the original source video. In this case if you crop the image you will still get a larger horizontal field of view than without the conversion lens.
In many cases this is actually the best way to produce a 16:9 movie with your ordinary 4:3 miniDV camera. Use a wide conversion lens on the camera in the recording phase and then crop the image during DV to mpeg-2 encoding. You may use the letterboxing (widescreen option) on your miniDV just to make sure you shoot within the black bars on frame. You are going to
crop out these bars anyway.

Has anyone tried this or any other thoughts? I have a 0.5X lens for mine. I might give it a try and see how it turns out.

[guns1inger]

You can buy anamorphic lenses for DV cameras, which will give you better output, but you can't hurt anything giving this a try. Worst case, you then have to tape over that bit of tape.