Waste Ink Counter

❗Article Status Notice: This Article is a stub

---

This article is underdeveloped, and needs additional work to meet the wiki's Content Guidelines and be in line with our Mission Statement for comprehensive coverage of consumer protection issues. Learn more ▼

Issues may include:

• This article needs to be expanded to provide meaningful information
• This article requires additional verifiable evidence to demonstrate systemic impact
• More documentation is needed to establish how this reflects broader consumer protection concerns
• The connection between individual incidents and company-wide practices needs to be better established
• The article is simply too short, and lacks sufficient content

How you can help:

• Add documented examples with verifiable sources
• Provide evidence of similar incidents affecting other consumers
• Include relevant company policies or communications that demonstrate systemic practices
• Link to credible reporting that covers these issues
• Flesh out the article with relevant information

This notice will be removed once the article is sufficiently developed. Once you believe the article is ready to have its notice removed, please visit the Moderator's noticeboard, or the Discord (join here) and post to the #appeals channel, or mention its status on the article's talk page.

A Waste Ink Counter (WIC) is a firmware-based lockout that causes printers to cease to function when a counter has been incremented above a certain value.

How it works

Embedded software inside of a printer tracks how many times the print head has been flushed into an absorbent 'ink pad'. Print operations commonly cause flushing to ensure optimum print quality by preventing the print head from clogging and leaving unprinted (white) streaks on paper.

The explanation for the lockout being given is that an ink pad may get soaked and could possibly overflow. Replacement of the ink pad does not reset the waste ink counter as this is simply a counter in the firmware of the device.

Why it is a problem

WIC counters cannot be easily reset from regular driver software or open source software. Even though ink pads can be replaced, the printer's firmware will still cease to operate the printer as normal unless the WIC counter has been reset or decremented. Proprietary and undocumented commands must be sent to the printer for this to work.

Examples

• Item 1