What lens are you using?. Also if the camera is set to Adobe RGB the pictures can look lifeless on the monitor.
Most Nikons err to the side of softness out of the box, expecting you to apply sharpening more accurately on your PC, if you just want to point and squirt, so to speak, just raise the sharpness one notch in your cameras menu (I have with my D300).

The D50 produced notably punchy pictures "out of the box" (it was my last camera) designed to appeal to novices, I rather liked it, you should certainly be able to customise your D80 to produce similar images, maybe up one notch with contrast, sharpness and saturation will give some more "zap".