The digitization of histological specimens has become increasingly common within the last years
however, digitization of cytological slides has its own challenges and there is little guidance on the optimal use of digitization devices for cytopathology. For the morphological analysis of cells in, for example, bone marrow aspirate (BMA) smears, different studies have used a variety of scanner setups and there is no direct comparison between those. This makes it non-trivial to choose an optimal scanner setup. This work pragmatically analyzes different whole slide image (WSI) scanners but also cost-effective light microscope solutions and identifies important aspects for the digitization of cytopathological samples. The aim is to share our experience in selecting a digitization device for generating a BMA dataset.