D300 Noise reduction

[ollie]

Fell free to shoot me down if this has been discussed before but i did do a search and found nothing.

I recently started using the D300 after stepping up to it from the D80. One of the first things i noticed was the increased levels of noise in my shots. I felt this effectively limited my ISO usage. Well things came to the crunch on the weekend and I should have shot at 1600 instead of 800 and stuffed up a number of important shots. I started googling to find WHY the D300 was so noisy.

I have been shooting in RAW on both the D80 and the D300. Long story short , I was under the impression that nulled out all of the in camera picture settings IE Vivid etc. I went into Shooting Menu | Set picture control |SD| and turned the sharpening to 0. And wow what a difference it has made to me.

I don't know if any else has the same problem or it is just common knowledge to everyone but me

Cheers
Ollie