As for the black ink, it is something you just have to play around with.
I do a lot of photography work (though not as much as I used to
), and the vast majority of it was black and white. We were experimenting with printers and inks trying to find the best ways to get rid of just that funky black you are talking about--a sort of pasty, thick black, that almost looks fake. When you are printing fine art black and white prints, blacks like that are absolutely unacceptable. We tooled around with different inks for a while, and eventually found that the largest factor in the richness of the black was actually the paper. We found an Epson rag paper that worked incredibly well. The problem was that it was expensive--about $4 for a 16x20 sheet.
As far as I know, the person I was experimenting it with is still playing around, trying to find the best thing for different applications. It really is just a matter of experimentation.