Digital BW, The Print

>I know this is a topic much discussed, esp. in the more distant past, but 
>I wasn't able to find answers through a search without having to wade 
>through a very large number of irrelevant posts.  Sorry.

I printed a photo yesterday using the UT (1) inks on EEM, and had rather 
severe banding and what looks like pixelization.  The only thing I did kind 
of weird to this file was that I reset the middle-gray point to get a more 
neutral and contrasty print.  The original negative is Delta 3200 @ 3200, 
and with all the base fog it's pretty muddy and low contrast.  Even after 
tweaking the contrast I still wasn't happy with the whites, so I just did 
the little "click to set grey" thing on a levels layer and ended up with 
something that looked a lot better on screen.  However, the histogram is 
rather ugly now - there are a lot of gaps.

Does a file like this, with a gap-filled histogram (sorry, not sure if 
there's a better term), cause this blotchy output?

just wondering.  I'll mess around with settings tonight.
allan


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