Controls and OSD

The five physical buttons at the bottom-right edge of the panel are used to launch and navigate the on-screen display. You can assign various quick actions to the middle three buttons, such as brightness control, picture profile selection, USB Switch, speaker volume, shadow balance, PiP/PbP, input selection, and so on. The overall button layout isn't particularly intuitive, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that I struggled to use the OSD. The main part of the OSD is split into a total of five sections: Professional, Picture Settings, PiP/PbP, OSD Settings, and Other Settings.


The Professional menu is where you'll find settings such as color temperature, gamma, sharpness, shadow balance (another name for the black level adjustment), blue light filter, hue, and saturation, as well as four picture modes: Standard Mode, sRGB Mode, Adobe Mode, and Uniformity Mode. The picture modes are undocumented in the supplied user manual, but pretty self-explanatory. Of course, using sRGB Mode and Adobe Mode locks you out of adjusting the color temperature and gamma. We'll dive deeper into the aforementioned modes in the picture quality section of this review.


In the Picture Settings menu, you can adjust brightness and contrast, activate or deactivate dynamic contrast and several emulated HDR modes, adjust the aspect ratio, and switch between various picture profiles, such as Movie, Reading, Night, and Care Eyes. For optimal picture quality, the Contextual model setting, under which you'll find all these profiles, should be set to Off. Some of these menu names (translations) are wild.


The PiP/PbP menu is very interesting. You can choose from among several picture-by-picture modes, as well as activate picture-in-picture mode. When using PbP, you can have two input signals on each half of the screen, but INNOCN also thought about a scenario involving your smartphone as one of your video input devices. In PbP "phone" mode, roughly one-fourth of the screen is dedicated to a phone, and the rest is reserved for your regular PC input signal. In PiP mode, you can select the size and position of the secondary window and pick which of the connected sources is your preferred audio source. There's also an option to quickly swap video sources between the two PiP windows.


The most important part of the OSD Settings menu is the hotkey configuration. Use it to assign various functions to the middle three physical buttons between the Home and Power buttons.


Everything else related to configuring the INNOCN 27C1U is found in the Other Settings menu used to switch between the video inputs, mute the speakers, activate or deactivate Gravity Sensor, initiate a USB firmware upgrade, reset the settings to factory defaults, and so on.

The OSD is obviously missing a couple of settings. Most notable is the complete absence of the Overdrive setting, meaning there's no way to increase the pixel response time from its default value, which isn't specified by the manufacturer. There's also no way to turn off the annoyingly large and bright power LED, which is disappointing.

I also noticed an issue with some OSD settings resetting to their defaults after using the PiP/PbP mode, and with the screen brightness randomly dropping all the way down to 60 cd/m² in Uniformity Mode. To restore it, I had to switch the monitor to any other mode and back and reactivate the custom color temperature settings for Uniformity Mode. These seem like firmware bugs which will hopefully be fixed through a future firmware update. The OSD offers an option to update the firmware via one of the monitor's USB ports.