Digital BW, The Print

Hi, I'm a newbie here. Found this site as a result of my frustration 
with getting decent ouput from Inkjet printers from grayscale 
files.

I'm involved in the restoration of about 400 medium (actually  an 
odd size) scans of glass plate negatives taken in the middle 
east circa 1927 (see www.epicvisions.org).

For our smaller output we purchased an Epson 2000p. As you 
can imagine, the results (to put it mildly) suck. The tonal quality 
is awful unless you set the printer to black ink only, but then there 
is an unacceptable pattern overlaid on the image. Epson claims 
to not support printing photos with black ink only.  I have tried 
tweaking just about every setting imaginable, and nothing is of 
the quality I would sell.  The only decent images I get are when I 
convert to duotone and then print with the photo-enhance Sepia 
setting -- but then I am unable to tweak that setting to get the 
precise toning I'm looking for.

Yes, I know about Piezo, but I'm not ready to spend another $900 
on some technology I have to install myself (I am not very goo 
with stuff like that) and have not see any results from live.

What I am trying to find, and can't seem to is a printer with decent 
output which can use *unmodified* some sort of third party 
grayscale or sepia ink set (such as from Luminos, Lyson, or 
someone else I haven't heard of yet). That new Canon 9000 
looks great, but I haven't seen any ink sets available for it.

Am I on a wild goose chase here?  Can someone point me in 
the right direction........

By the way. I was hesitant to join this group because every other 
time I've joined a Yahoo group resulted in a ton of SPAM.  Any 
clues on how to avoid this?