There are a whole line of VERY nice IR receivers / detectors that are built by the company that was at one time TEMIC. They have been acquired by Vishay.

These parts are, in my opinion and from real word experience, better than the IR receivers built by Everlight and/or Sharp that they put in the small metal boxes.

The Temic / Vishay parts have built in shielding, are in very nice 3 leaded plastic encapsulated package that adapts for PC board use quite nicely. My expereince gained from designing these into products is that they are permit longer working distances than the other parts, are auto insertable, less immune to florescent office lighting, and take 75% (or more)less PC board space.

Here are links to a selection of the parts:

http://www.vishay.com/docs/tsop17.pdf

http://www.vishay.com/docs/tsop18.pdf


And here is the link to their product selector:

http://www.vishay.com/products/...ml

I hope this helps some...
Mike Karas