Is there any way to get smoothed bitmaps that aren't quite as blurred?

I'm building a 2D wheel of icons, each of which is a dynamically loaded png.

I was hoping that if I imported crisp 100px by 100px .pngs into container clips that were scaled down to 50px-by-50px, they would be pretty clear when they were z-rotated. But I found that they were terribly aliased.

So then I was hoping for crisp anti-aliased icons by loading the large .pngs into Bitmap objects with smoothing=true, then adding those Bitmaps to container clips which were scaled to 50%. I was expecting the bitmaps would be smoothed first, and then the blurryness would be reduced when the clips were shrunk. It looks though like the clips are smoothed after transformation, and they're noticeably blurry.

Is there any way to achieve something in between, so the rotated images appear clearly?