Digital BW, The Print

Here's how it happened, from start to beginning.  Please excuse the 
terseness, but I'm sure you've all heard it before so I'll try and be 
brief.  The question is at the end if you want to skip the crap.

-Bought 1280.  Loved it from the start, but paper choice and profiles 
sucked for "archival" color work.  B&W using color sucked more.

-Didn't like the idea of paying hundreds for Piezography or similar 
system, so never bought that.  Didn't know about MIS inks or similar 
things at the time.  I wish I had known about this forum!!!  

-2200 came out!  Reviews (not from Epson) talked about how wonderful 
the B&W output was.  No metarism apparantly, and anyway I had no idea 
what the hell that actually meant.  Had gray balancer - wonderful!

-Bought 2200.  Color work is excellent.  Can use favorite semi-gloss 
paper without it looking like crap, and it will last more than a year 
or two, so I can now give pictures away without feeling cheap.

-B&W not so good.  Getting neutral gray almost impossible even with 
gray balancer.  I start to quickly learn about metamerism in the same 
way that you learn very quickly about a rare disease you just 
caught.  I wasted about 100 bucks on paper and inks with Gray 
balancer and still am not there.

-Start looking into these RIPs.  Download PowerRIP demo (thanks 
Daniel).  Actually looks pretty damn good (I recommend trying it), 
but still is not there for me because I'm just really fussy.  0-10% 
looks fairly dotty.  Thought about IP5, but 500 bucks is a bit much.  
Metamerism still exists but it is VERY reduced over normal color 
B&W.  Can't say why - no flatbed scanner or microscope.

-Use BO mode.  Awful awful awful.  I agree with Peter that some 
people just can't see the dots.  That's great for them, but it really 
bugs me.  It just doesn't look smooth.  Not good enough.  Bah.

-I start to look over at my old 1280 sitting in the corner.  I never 
got round to selling it, and that would probably only get me about 
200 bucks.  Can't get Imageprint for 200 bucks, PowerRIP still 
doesn't cut it at that price.

So that's my history in B&W printing.  Thank God I live in Seattle 
and the thought of being outside taking pictures is just nowhere in 
my mind.  If I lived somewhere nice I'd feel bad that I have spent 
all this time on my "photography hobby" with nothing to show for it.

Why am bothering to tell you all this?  Well, I'm thinking about 
using the old 1280 with MIS VM inks and those Roark curves.  From 
reading other posts it seems like I might up and running in an 
evening or two, especially as I'm quite good with printing step 
wedges and messing around with curves.

Would anyone else recommend this as a good setup?  Anyone else had 
the same experience and gone back to the old, rejected Epson?

Thanks in advance!

   Matthew