Controls and OSD

The INNOCN 39G1R uses a practical four-way joystick, which also works as a button for OSD navigation and monitor setup. It's located underneath the bottom bezel, in the dead center of the monitor, just below the INNOCN logo. The same joystick is used to quickly toggle between factory picture profiles and virtual crosshairs. Oddly enough, there are no quick toggles for input selection or speaker volume. Navigating the OSD is pleasant, but the menu structure is a bit weird, with some basic options needlessly placed in their own menus, and some others located in places where you wouldn't necessarily look for them.

The OSD is split into the following sections: Input Source, Brightness/Contrast, Color Settings, Picture Quality Settings, Display, Audio, Multi-Window, OSD, and Other.


The Input Source menu is where you – you've guessed it – select the active input.


The Brightness/Contrast menu contains the brightness, contrast, and black level settings, as well as the dynamic contrast toggle, which disables other settings in this menu. Leave it off.


The Color Setting menu has your usual selection of options: gamma (1.8 to 2.6 in 0.2 increments), color profiles, color temperature, blue light filtering, hue, saturation, and RGB range, which can be either Full (0-255) or Limited (16-235).


Oddly enough, the Picture Quality Setting menu contains the most important gaming-related settings, such as overdrive (called Response Time in this case) and MPRT. I didn't find any purpose in the low-resolution sharpening (Noise Reduction) feature of the 39G1R, or the Dynamic Luminous Control, which does strange things to contrast and makes the picture look weird.


The Display menu only lets you manually select the picture aspect ratio (Wide Screen, 4:3, 1:1, or Auto). Was there really no way to just relocate this option to one of the other menus rather than giving it a whole separate menu entry?


The Audio menu lets you mute the speakers, adjust the volume, and select the audio source, in case you're using Picture-in-Picture or Picture-by-Picture modes. A more logical place for the latter would be the Multi-Window menu.


In the Multi-Window menu, you can choose between Picture-in-Picture and Picture-by-Picture modes, or turn both of them off and just use the 39G1R as a regular monitor. When using PbP, two input signals take up one-half of the screen each. In PiP mode, you can select the size and position of the secondary window and pick which connected source is your preferred audio source. There's also an option to quickly swap video sources between the two PiP windows.


The OSD menu is where you can select the exact position of the OSD, its transparency, language, timeout, and rotation.


The final menu is called Other. Here's where INNOCN placed the options that for some reason didn't fit elsewhere, such as DisplayPort version (DP 1.1, 1.2 or 1.4), the adaptive synchronization toggle, HDR toggle and reset button.