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There’s a certain thrill in making an electronic gadget do something that the manufacturer wouldn’t otherwise give you access to. I first experienced this thrill over a decade ago when jailbreaking my iPhone 5s. I won’t get into the details of why that was done, but it certainly helped make the experience a lot less restricted than those earlier iOS versions were. So when I received an opportunity to try something similar out for an old Canon compact that was lying in the corner of my home, I decided to give it a whirl. Spoiler alert – it added so many more features to my IXUS 95, from 2009, which Canon never really gave original purchasers of their compacts
Loading CHDK Is Tasking But Rewarding
CHDK, or Canon Hack Development Kit, is an open-source repository that contains firmware that gives your older, highly limited Canon compact cameras a new and refreshing lease of life. What’s super interesting is that it does all of this without modifying the camera’s original firmware. Think of it like slipping a CD into the music player of your boring car and finding it transforming into KITT from the Knight Rider series. CHDK doesn’t rewrite your firmware or burn itself into the camera’s brain – it just lives on the SD card and boots temporarily. Turn the camera off or pull the card, and you’re back to factory-fresh Canon. It’s like the early jailbreak days for iPhone, except instead of sketchy cracked apps, you’re getting RAW capture, HDR bracketing, motion detection, time-lapse scripting, and a bunch of geeky readouts Canon never thought to include.
Finding the exact firmware for your Canon compact requires quite a lot of reading and research. In my case, that wasn’t the hardest part. Nearly a decade after leaving that lifestyle behind, I had to use all my coding skills to successfully get the IXUS95 to read the CHDK firmware off the card. Part of this was due to the fact that the SD cards nowadays are of a much larger capacity than what these old cameras can easily read from. I had to use Terminal on my Mac Mini and partition a 16Gb SD card into 8Mb (yes Mb) and 12Gb partitions. I think it took nearly a day to get to this unique combination before the camera was able to successfully read the CHDK even after rebooting, as until then it would either just fail to see the CHDK firmware on the card, or would stop reading it after restarting the camera. There’s a special kind of patience you learn when you’re knee-deep in hexadecimal build numbers and SD card boot flags
Think of it like slipping a CD into the music player of your boring car and finding it transforming into KITT from the Knight Rider series.
Once CHDK finally worked, it was pure nostalgic magic. The IXUS 95 suddenly had features I’d only seen on DSLRs from the same era. Shooting RAW gave me real editing latitude, pulling detail from shadows that would’ve been lost in its noisy JPEGs. HDR bracketing worked beautifully when you kept your hand steady. Motion detection, intervalometer, and live histograms, video features, delayed shutter clicks, even custom scripts, were all running on a pocket cam I could hide in my palm. All of this wouldn’t be possible with the native camera firmware. I only wish Nikon had something similar that I could try on my Nikon 1 J5 (which, for some reason, Nikon decided to give a choppy 15 frames per second in 4K video mode)
CHDK has its quirks, of course, and you often have to adjust and readjust your muscle memory while using it. For instance, the Play button is primarily used to activate the CHDK menu when the camera is on. But how do you view the photos that you’ve just taken, you ask? You need to press it while the camera is off, which then powers it into review mode like it normally would.
Now Is A Great Time To Try CHDK
The timing for this rediscovery feels perfect. Pocket cameras are creeping back into the mainstream, not so much because Tiktokers find the “90’s digital look” to be a fad they can earn their likes and follows off, but because they feel better in your hands. You get tactile buttons, a zoom you can actually control, and a shooting experience that’s more about intention and has a lot more sensation than swiping on a glass screen. CHDK helps a lot by giving you features that make the camera more relevant in 2025 than it was in 2009. If you’ve got an old IXUS collecting dust, consider this your invitation. Grab CHDK, get ready to tinker a little (or a lot), and see what that tiny camera can really do. You might just find yourself leaving your smartphone behind, shooting with a grin at the oddest of places, and feeling like you’ve pulled off a small trip back in time. I thoroughly enjoyed using this camera with the CHDK firmware and I’m absolutely certain I wouldn’t have done so without access to all these features.
If you don’t have a Canon compact to try CHDK on, and you badly want the 90’s digital look, why not buy our presets that help you do this. Click here to buy them for Lightroom or Capture One
