Abstract
In the center of our paper are two counterexamples showing the independence of the
concepts of global smoothness preservation and variation diminution for sequences of
approximation operators. Under certain additional assumptions it is shown that the variation-diminishing property is the stronger one. It is also demonstrated, however, that there are positive linear operators giving an optimal pointwise degree of approximation, and which preserve global smoothness, monotonicity and convexity, but are not variation-diminishing.