I have no idea what the poster who says VNX2 boosts exposure of images means.
Get yourself an evenly lit gray card (or even an evenly-lit white wall...doesn't matter,) perform a custom white balance, spot meter, and take a picture.
In Raw Therapee with the "neutral" profile, you'll get RGB values of 100, 100, 100 at the metered spot...plus or minus 5. If you examine the image with Rawnalyze and apply the white balance from the camera, you'll get sRGB values of around 100. That's the correct value, as the meter calibration works out to 12.7% reflectance, and that equals sRGB 100, 100, 100.
In ViewNX 2 with the Neutral picture control, you'll get 155, 155, 155. Even with my custom picture control (which basically doesn't apply any processing) I get 140, 140, 140. This behavior of ViewNX and the camera's processing engine causes people to claim that Nikon's overexpose, and I see lots of images with -.33 or -.67 of EC applied.
In fact one of VNX2's strenghts as a raw-processor is that it opens the file and displays it exactly like it looked on the in-camera screen/jpeg.
That's right...the camera JPEG is boosted as well.
I also disagree with not using matrix metering because it's unreliable.
Well, as no one else in the thread mentioned Matrix metering I'm assuming that you're referring to my statement of matrix being unpredictable. Matrix metering is unpredictable by design because it applies its own exposure compensation. Matrix will meter the entire frame and will use the metering pattern and scene colors to search its database of over 30,000 scenes to find a match. If it finds one, then it will apply the exposure compensation that had previous been determined for that scene by some Nikon photographer. So the camera will recognize, for example, a beach scene, and apply positive EC because the bright colors of the beach and sky tend to cause such scenes to be underexposed. A problem that people experience is that a slight shift in composition will change the exposure by a questionably large amount. The likely reason is that Matrix matched a different scene with a different EC.
So a photographer's evaluation of the reliability of Matrix metering will depend largely upon the type of images captured. Someone who sticks to the type of scenes in the database will get great results. Someone who prefers abstract, macro, or other types of "artsy" photography will likely have less reliable metering.
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