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 and contrast control, picture profile selection, 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 I struggled to use the OSD. I only had to get used to the fact that the leftmost button is used to confirm the selection.

The main part of the OSD is split into a total of six sections: Game Settings, Professional, Picture Settings, PiP/PbP, OSD Settings, and Other Settings.


The Game Settings menu has a couple of gaming-specific picture profiles (RTS/RPG Mode, FPS Arena Mode, and MOBA Arena Mode), which do weird things to color temperature and image sharpness, so they're best left alone. It's somewhat strange that the picture profiles have to be toggled on and off instead of just being selectable from a list, but this is a logic INNOCN obviously prefers since it's present on every monitor of theirs I had a chance of testing. The Game Settings menu contains some other, more relevant options, such as the Adaptive Sync toggle, Overdrive selection (called "Response Time" in this case), and Game Crosshair selection.


There are six virtual crosshairs to pick from. Their color can't be adjusted, so you're stuck with the default red offering. Bright green would have been a better choice as it's in most cases the most visible color against in-game surroundings. Too bad there isn't a clean dot or "+" style crosshair, as those are preferred by many gamers.


The Professional menu is where you'll find settings such as color temperature, gamma, sharpness, shadow balance (another name for 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.


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 all these profiles are found, should be set to Off.


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, while 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 connected source 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 40C1R is found in the Other Settings menu used to switch between the video inputs, mute the speakers, reset the settings to factory defaults, and so on. What's obviously missing is the option to deactivate the power LED. While I didn't find its blue glow distracting, turning it off should be possible regardless.