Bitmap smoothing w/ loaded images

Question

I know there was a lot of stuff about this for AS2, but I
cant seem to find anything more recent—and I am still having
this problem! I have a sprite, with a loader (which I dont add to
the stage). The loader loads a large image, scales it way down and
then draws it. No matter how I do this, the resulting Image is
always aliased. Setting the stage quality to 'best' did resolve
this, but the site took too much of a performance hit otherwise.
I have tried:
1. adding the loader to the stage, and setting smoothing to
true when content loads
2. creating a new bitmap on load, with smoothing set to true
(both in constructor and after)
3. creating a shape on load and using bitmap fill, with
smoothing on
Sample code for all three is below, but #3 is the one I
really want to use, because I need 9-slice scaling. What am I doing
wrong?!!

Answer 1

Your first try is the closest. The only thing is you need to
add the bitmap to the stage, not the loader. And you need to wait
for the content to load before you can create a bitmap of the
_imageLoader.content. Try this: