I'm a little late to the party, but here's my two cents. I complained heavily when I first purchased my D700 that it overexposed shots. Almost all my shots were overexposed and I had to use the exposure compensation to -.7 - -1.0 which I thought was ridiculous. I even went into the custom settings and made it permanent, but quickly took it off because my exposures were all over the map.

What I finally found out, after 2 years, is that if you shoot in Center Weighted metering instead of Matrix Metering you'll get the exposures you're looking for. Also if you set your ADR to low instead of auto you'll get "better" exposures.

For what it's worth I still can't get over how many exposures people have on their cameras. I've had my camera for 2 years and I'm pretty sure I'm still well under 15,000 exposures. I come from the film days where every shot counted since I only had a max of 12 or 36 exposures (depending on the camera being used).

Good luck and congrats on your new camera.

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