Originally posted by Odisseus Are you saying that the quick preview after shot is converted to JPG and thus all respective JPG settings are applied which I deliberately ignore while shooting in RAW? I'm sorry, it does not make much sense to me. I dont think that the developers are stupid enough to waste the system resourses on useless conversion of this kind.
That's exactly what they do. These JPEG settings (WB, contrast, brightness etc.. ) are irrelevant to the underlying raw. Most of these settings will be ignored in a 3rd party raw converter, WB is the only one that attempts to get transferred (not always faithfully), but you can losslessly change the WB setting of a RAW file for a different interpretation of the captured data..
You can test it yourself, in raw mode take the same photo twice using manual white balance set to opposite extremes (preferably on a tripod). On the back of the camera, one preview will be very orange, the other very blue. Load both raw's into a converter and set them to a common WB. They'll be identical (up to camera movement, changes in light, etc.). You can do the same test with the other jpeg settings, and you'll get the same result.
Can't help with poor AWB performance though, sorry. I usually just stick to daylight for consistent previews and batch convert the WB to what I want in lightroom.