Of course it depends on your ca mera and on the audio inputs. The article you linked mentions this.

The biggest problem I had with this article was Sam's belief that a recorder will give you "full, rich sound." No one - even the pros recording multi-million dollar movies - get full, rich sound on location or on stage. During production you are only recording the dialogue. At least that's all that you should be recording. That "full, rich" sound comes in post - what you need is clean dialogue tracks with no "noise" - no ambient sounds.

You can get by just fine with a good ca mera using XLR inputs. It's better to record to another machine - one dedicated to audio only - but not essential to get clean, quiet dialogue tracks. With a Nagra or minidisc you have more control over the audio and you usually have a recordist who is doing nothing but monitoring the levels. This is something most newer movie makers neglect. They monitor the visuals (lighting, composition, movement) carefully and then just plug in a mic and go. The audio needs just as much attention. Sometimes even more. You would never shoot a scene with a car passing in front of the actors, blocking them, but many times you don't even notice the cars sounds in the back ground or an airplane flying over. But the mic does.

If your camera doesn't have XLR inputs you're going to have some signal loss so you just have to pay more attention to the audio input. But it can be done.

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The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but progress.
Joseph Joubert, essayist (1754-1824)

I agree. Just learn to make use of what you have. If all you can do is record through your camera then take the proper steps to make sure that the sound coming into it is as good as possible (i.e. no distortion, no clipping, input level isn't too high). You can test recording sounds in different situations and then listen back to see your results. This will help you save time when you shoot because you will know or at least have a good idea of what is needed to get the best audio possible. The only problem i've always had with recording into the camera is cell phone interference...you know those little beep beep beeps. I've found that those annoying sounds usually dont occur when using external recording means (though they still tend to from time to time, but much less). Of course the easiest way to get rid of that is to simply just tell everyone to turn their phones off, but when your working with a large group of people, that's not always easy.
Another thing you can do is to beef up your sound once it has been recorded. You can do all of this with an audio editing program. Usually, most programs have noise reductions, hiss reductions, and various compressors and eqs, as well as many available plug-ins.
I once did a short where the camera was messing up the audio, so i just recorded all of the dialogue on an old, small tape recorder and then synced it up in editing. Of course using a tape produced lots of noise, but after filtering it out, I was left with quite a clean sound. Though a bit of warning, it takes some practice to be able to filter right and not make the audio sound like a bad cell phone speaker!

Recording into the camera is good because you dont have to worry about syncing anything later on during editing, but you do lose a little bit of sound quality. Recording to an external device usually yeilds the best results, but can be expensive, and also painstaking during editing (unless, of course, you mark each shot and are keeping track of the time code) The cheapest portable digital recorder that i've seen is about $300. If you can't go with that then you can always try a tape recorder. They make very high-quality tape recorders for only around $20-$30, and they even have multi tracks, and monitoring inputs.

Well, I'm using a GL2, so all my audio goes through an XLR "box" that has a 1/8th jack. The canon itself, records at about 48khz/16bis IIRC.

So, I'll probably go for an external recorder...later when I have the money. Right now, just getting a better directional mic than those horrible shotguns we rent out from the school, will be a major improvement! 😉

Thanks guys!