In this work, the electromagnetic interaction of plane waves with infinitely long metamaterial-coated conducting cylinders is considered. Different from "conjugate" pairing of double-positive (DPS) and double-negative (DNG) or epsilon-negative (ENG) and mu-negative (MNG) concentric cylinders, achieving transparency and maximizing scattering are separately achieved by covering perfect electric conductor (PEC) cylinders with simple (i.e., homogeneous, isotropic, and linear) metamaterial coatings. The appropriate constitutive parameters of such metamaterials are investigated for Transverse Magnetic (TM) and in particular for Transverse Electric (TE) polarizations. For TE polarization it is found out that the metamaterial-coating permittivity has to be in the 0<epsilonc<epsilon0 interval to achieve transparency, and in the -epsilon0<epsilonc<0 interval to achieve scattering maximization. However, unlike the "conjugate" pairing of DPS-DNG or ENG-MNG cases, when the transparency for metamaterial-coated PEC cylinders are considered, the analytically found relation between epsilonc and the ratio of core-coating radii, gamma, should be modified in a sense that scattering from the PEC core is canceled by the coating. Furthermore, replacing epsilon by mu (and vice versa) does not lead to the same conclusions for TM polarization unless the PEC cylinder is replaced by a perfect magnetic conductor (PMC) cylinder. On the other hand, scattering maximization can also be achieved in the TM polarization case when coating permeability muc<0, whereas transparency requires large |muc| for this polarization. Numerical results in the form of normalized monostatic and bistatic echo widths, which demonstrate the transparency and scattering maximization phenomena, are given and possible application areas are discussed.