I've replaced the Java internal ImageFetcher with an own implementation using ImageIO. Some image renderers of our software, which use these images, now draw anti-aliased scaled images instead of non anti-aliased. The only change is the source of the image, which are now BufferedImages instead of Toolkit-Images.
The question now is, where is the difference? Which property causes the images to scale anti-aliased? I've always thought that the anti-alias key ONLY depends on the graphics I paint on - but this is obviously wrong.
By the way: unfortunately I cannot change the renderers.