The Waste Ink Counter (WIC) Reset Utility helps reset printers’ waste ink counters.
WIC Reset Utility is said to have been “developed for making service procedures with inkjet Epson and Canon printers” easier, such as “printhead power cleaning, fatal error codes reading, waste ink counters read and reset [and] print quality pattern printing”. The “most popular function” of the software is being able to “read waste ink counters”, as OEMs “put [these] inside the printers” and they “may overflow and the printer will stop printing”.
In turn, if you have many print jobs “it would be very useful to know” the values of these, as “if they are near to 100 percent” then “the printer may stop” and the job will “remain undone”, and the utility is free and is said to make it “easy to check” values. If the counters are “not overflowed” then “you can continue printing”, but if they have “you have to fix this situation”, which “technically” requires an “Epson service engineer to resolve”.
However it is “possible that you could fix it yourself by resetting the printer and clearing the counter of how much ink has gone” through, and save between $50 to $60 (€47 to €57). In a video, the company notes that “you have to buy [a] reset key” for the reset, which is “for one reset only”, and it urges users to “check if WIC supports my printer model” before buying, and “pay attention [to] what functions are available for your printer model”.
Some models have options to read the counters available, but a “reset function is not available”, as “some printer models have [a] separate maintenance ink cartridges, which has its own IC chip”, which can be “reset by [a] hardware chip resetter only”, and not “by any software […] so, please pay attention to this fact and first check your printer’s model support”. After resetting the counter the key “will [become] used”, but you are able to check its status.
The company features a host of tutorial videos on its website, and the WIC Reset Utility can be downloaded for Windows XP and 7 as well as Mac OS 10.5 and higher, with the FreeWare software supporting English, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Turkish, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian and Spanish.