Digital BW, The Print

Below is a recent message that I posted to the Piezography support 
group.  Interestingly, I wasn't able to get any confirmation
about whether my results using their system are normal.  Furthermore, 
Cone's tech support appears to be ignoring me since I sent them
this same question over a week ago and still no response.  Any help 
would be very very very much appreciated as these dots are driving me 
crazy!

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I'm new to the Piezo system so I'm having a hard time telling if the 
results I'm getting are normal or if I have a defective printer or am 
doing something wrong.

Please check the following two output scans of Paul Roark's improved 
21-step wedge file to see an example of the dots I'm getting in the 
dark gray areas (thanks for posting this file Paul!).  My highlights 
are fine, but dots are very visible once the black ink kicks in when 
printing shadows (at least I think it is the black ink and not the 
dark gray ink).

This is a zoomed-out image that shows where the second image was 
taken from on the wedge (white box):
http://www.aronica.com/patch/WedgeFull.jpg

Here is the zoomed in version showing what is in the white box 
indicated above @ 1200dpi on a canon flatbed scanner:
http://www.aronica.com/patch/WedgeCloseup.jpg

My environment is as follows:
Epson 1200
PT-WN inks
Windows 2000 OS
EAM Paper
Using PiezographyBW 6.0.4

I also just cleaned the heads using the windex trick and was able to 
get rid of much of the microbanding. Also, I think I'm getting
perfect nozzle checks and alignments (done using EAM paper for both),
although this is hard to confirm since I've never seen an example
on the web that shows what a perfect one looks like.

As you can see in the scans, there is a very visible black (or dark 
gray?) dot patterns showing up which appear to suddenly stop (or 
start depending on which way you look at it) at the 55% or 114 gray 
step. These dots are visible to the naked eye (I'm 34 years old so 
eyesight is still somewhat okay).

So my question is, is this what other piezo users see when they print 
out the wedge? If not, is there a way to fix this? When I used to use 
the Lyson hex b&w inks and the epson driver I never saw any dots 
using the same printer. On the piezography website, it is claimed 
that PiezographyBW is 'dotless'. Why am I seeing dots?  Could my
printer be broken?

Here are a few more pictures that show the dots in a real world 
example:

Full size image with white box indicating zoomed in area:
http://www.aronica.com/patch/seaweed.jpg

Zoomed in area:
http://www.aronica.com/patch/seaweedcloseup.jpg

Thanks for your help with this frustrating problem in advance!
-Mark