We study the phase structure and chiral limit of 4d compact lattice QED with Wilson fermions (both dynamica.1 and quenched). We use the standard Wilson action (WA) and also the modified action (MA) with some lattice artifacts suppressed. We show that lattice artifacts influence the distributions of eigenvalues lambda(i) of the fermionic matrix especially for small values of lambda(i). Our main conclusion is that the chiral limit of compact QED can be efficiently located using different techniques.